On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in the first of two domestic assassination attempts. Three months after that Butler near-miss, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps tasked its longtime asset, by that asset’s own admission to U.S. law enforcement, to submit to the IRGC his own plan for assassinating Trump.
That the Iranians were still hunting for Trump’s head after someone else shot him is an expression of compulsion. Killing Trump was an obsession of theirs, and the heightened atmosphere of vigilance in the U.S. was no deterrent. Perhaps the Iranians were emboldened by their government’s success in placing an influence ring around the Biden administration’s Iran-policy team, but the mullahs’ sense of impunity regarding violence and political interference on America’s shores is unprecedented since the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, Trump is considering bombing a nuclear facility in Iran now that the skies over Iran are entirely clear of defenses. And his most strident critics are people who say the words “America First” a lot.
Perhaps they mean it ironically, because their disregard for American honor and American sovereignty and the fate of American citizens appears to be absolute.
While the Iranians were hunting the U.S. president, their militias were slaughtering Americans—something Iran has been doing for four decades—and taking them hostage. Here’s how the Iranian militia in Gaza treated Americans and others in their dungeons:
“Meals were intermittent. Water was scarce. And any failure to follow their captors’ instructions risked violent retribution.
“As [American hostage Keith] Siegel stepped into the room, panic washed over him: He found himself in the audience of a ‘medieval-style’ trial by torture, he said.”
Another U.S. hostage, the New Jerseyan Edan Alexander, “was held with a bag over his head at times and handcuffed, beaten and interrogated.” He was also “plagued by hunger, thirst and a lack of sanitary conditions during his time in Gaza, not to mention constant anxiety about the war raging around him.”
As an American, I have a hard time shrugging this off. As an American, I find it increasingly difficult to even understand the psychology of those who can shrug it off. And as an American, I find it incomprehensible that the defenders of these innocent American victims are accused of being disloyal Americans.
“They were schoolyard bullies,” Trump said of Iran this morning. “But now they’re not bullies anymore.” He specifically mentioned the Iranians’ motto of “Death to America,” which was also their battle plan and organizing program. He seemed pleased that there were finally consequences for Iran’s long war on the United States, that there is a price to be paid for all Iran’s mischief.
And here is the most interesting part: The price Iran has paid has not, in fact, been steep or cruel and unusual. In the history of mankind, no nation’s civilians have been safer while an enemy state controls their airspace during a live war. There’s nothing really to even compare it to. We are watching something no one has ever watched before. Israel, in response to Iran’s pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish people, not to mention its role in the worst daylong mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, took control of Iran’s airspace and used that to patiently eliminate the sources of the Iranian regime’s power to oppress its people.
Trump supports this. If it feels to the keyboard warriors of isolationism like there is a degree of pressure to support these strikes, that is because those who are comfortable with Iranian nuclear acquisition, which would grant the regime full immunity from all its ongoing crimes against America and Americans, are in the minority.
It is also because they must intuitively question, on some level, their own decision to draw the line in the sand right here. When Trump ordered the elimination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019, the handwringing from his MAGA supporters was muted. The same is true for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror general in charge of a global campaign to murder Americans. It was not cause for much in the way of hysterical warnings of apocalyptic warmongering.
The difference this time, of course, is Israel’s direct involvement. Most Americans seem to think this is a good thing—we have an allied nation willing to sacrifice to keep our common enemies down—but a few are uncomfortable for reasons they do not try very hard to disguise.
Whatever “America First” means, surely it ought not to mean a coldblooded heartlessness toward the victims of totalitarian terror, many of whom are Americans themselves. Nor should it mean an instinctive suspicion of anyone who seeks the defeat of America’s enemies.
