Trump sweats that he's let 'little devil' Lindsey Graham demolish his legacy: analysis
President Donald Trump is sweating that his war in Iran will blot his legacy with an indelible black stain — and he's blaming a key ally for making it happen, a columnist wrote Tuesday.
While the 47th President of the United States has much to worry about when it comes to his legacy — from his prominence in the Jeffrey Epstein files to the unmanaged cost-of-living crisis — the latest crisis is the one Trump is worrying about, Heather Digby Parton, wrote in Salon.
And she suggested the influence of Republican Party members and administration figureheads had strong-armed the president into making a call on whether to strike Iran — and he knows it.
Parton wrote, "Trump knows that a failed war would be the ultimate black mark on his legacy, and until now he was reluctant to go all out.
"But [Lindsey] Graham was there, the little devil on his shoulder, whispering sweet nothings into the presidential ears about how Trump will be remembered as one of history’s greatest leaders if only he will do what no president in his lifetime has been willing to do: launch wars of choice to demonstrate American military might."
Graham and the rest of the admin's influence on Trump may come back to bite the president who, Parton suggests, should have known better than to be dragged into a war he could not win.
"Until now, even the most hawkish Republican presidents knew this notion was absurd," Parton wrote. "They had learned from the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican.
"Over three years, from 1965 to 1968, the U.S. conducted Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign with the objective of putting the Viet Cong in their place — and it was remarkably unsuccessful.
"Nixon tried it again with Operation Linebacker in 1972, and it was equally a failure. The North Vietnamese were not cowed. They just kept on fighting until the U.S. finally pulled up stakes three years later and withdrew.
"Of course the hawks all said that the military just didn’t go hard enough, destroy enough, kill enough or it would have worked — an argument that persisted throughout the rest of the Cold War and the years of Iraq and Afghanistan."
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