The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

THE world certainly looks a bit different this morning than it did just a week ago. To make sense of it all, a former university professor and mentor to numerous politicians and government officials had some ideas.

Richard has lived in Washington and New York for most of his 77 years. While it’s not quite true that he has done it all and seen it all, it is fair to say that he’s done and seen a lot more than most of us. He was sitting on his side porch earlier this week, reflecting on everything that’s been happening.

“I think there’s a consensus building around Donald Trump’s invasion of Iran and decapitating its repressive leadership,” Rick said. “The first question is why did Trump do it? While much of the punditry has focused on an apparent lack of planning for the aftermath of the staggering success of the US military in largely defanging the Iranian military and killing many of Iran’s senior theocratic leadership, Trump and those officials closest to him have offered no clear explanation for why he did it, and why he did it now.

“But I think the president knows very well why he did it. He invaded Iran because he needed a headline reset from Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his allies in the US Department of Justice and House of Representatives have spent much of his second term obfuscating, delaying, and trying to distract American voters from that astounding scandal that continues to spread, with Epstein at its epicentre,” Rick concluded.

And in the first days after last weekend’s initiation of the US-Israeli joint war against Iran, this ploy seemed to be working. The nation--and the world--was appropriately stunned at Trump’s action, despite the predictive reality of the massive, inexorable buildup of US forces in and around the Middle East ahead of the attacks. News anchors rushed to Israel to begin broadcasting from the war zone. Banner headlines competed with each other to magnify the latest war events. Epstein slipped away from the commentary and probably from the general consciousness.

But this Epstein scandal looks like it’s going to be harder to eradicate than Trump must have thought, and his plans were inadvertently nearly undone by his close allies on the House Oversight Committee.

This committee is responsible for investigating government operations, and its current chair is Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, a strong right-wing Trump acolyte and leading attacker of Joe and Hunter Biden. Other prominent Republicans on this group include key members like Jim Jordan of Ohio, also chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Lauren Boebert, the Colorado congresswoman who has become well-known for her unflinching support of Trump, gun rights, whittling away the constitutional divisions between church and state and various far right conspiracy theories.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was also a member of the Oversight Committee before her falling out with Trump late last year and her subsequent resignation from Congress. No doubt Comer & company believed they were helping out the president when they subpoenaed both Bill and Hillary Clinton to investigate their ties to Epstein. The resulting depositions were taken late last week, right on the eve of Trump’s invasion of Iran.

Far from shifting the Epstein spotlight away from the president and onto the Clintons, however, the Oversight Committee made themselves and the Trump administration look foolish. Hillary Clinton clearly had nothing to do with Epstein, and Bill Clinton managed to avoid any verbal missteps that might have aided in the development of a narrative to distract attention from Trump’s own long association with Epstein.

Hillary Clinton, as revealed when the transcripts of the deposition were released, suggested logically that Trump himself would be a much more logical and appropriate for depositions on Epstein than either of the Clintons. It’s pretty hard to argue with that. It might eventually happen.

Even as Trump was trying to distract attention from Epstein, ironically, his own allies forced the nation’s attention right back to Epstein. Bad luck for the president.

Yesterday morning, for instance, a big story on Epstein was prominent on the second page of the Washington Post. This story is not going away soon, and especially because of the president’s obsession with it, it’s beginning to seem like it might even eventually bring him down.

Trump’s real political forebear in American politics is not Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln as he sometimes asserts. It’s Richard Nixon, and Trump’s Epstein problem is beginning to resemble the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced Nixon from office in 1974. Like Trump, Nixon tried in various ways to sweep that issue away, but it dogged him until he had to leave Washington. Will that force out Trump or critically weaken his position?

Rick thought about that. “We really have no idea about that,” he said. “I absolutely agree that Nixon is Trump’s true political antecedent, and that there are many similarities between these two presidents and their response to dissent. But Trump’s position is still strong, politically. I wouldn’t get too engaged in forecasting his imminent demise.”

The art of political distraction is hardly new. Democratic and autocratic leaders have often resorted to creating or inflaming overseas crises to deflect negative popular opinion at home.

Wikipedia tells us that “a diversionary foreign policy, or a diversionary war, is an international relations term that identifies a warinstigated by a country's leader in order to distract its population from his own domestic troubles. Diversionary war theory states that leaders who are threatened by domestic turmoil may initiate an international conflict in order to improve their standing. Election cycles have a lot to do with diversionary wars because a war ideally increases the chance that the incumbent administration will remain.”

According to Wikipedia, diversionary war theory identifies several major potential advantages for the leader pursuing overseas distractions: (1) A successful diversionary foreign policy could increase support for the domestic regime. This in turn increases that government's time to address their internal troubles; (2) Artificial tension created from the international conflict may justify a leader's suppression of dissent; (3) The war abroad could distract the population from the issues that induced the original dissatisfaction with the government.

Does any of this sound applicable to the current situation?

Trump is, of course, not the only contemporary leader to resort to diversionary war theory.  A 2017 study in the journal Security Studies found that Russia's seizure of Crimea in early 2014 "increased national pride among Russians while support for President Vladimir Putin rose dramatically, and they suggest that the two processes were causally linked."

It has also been widely speculated that the timing of the 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran coincided with an ongoing motion of no confidenceagainst the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The embattled Israeli PM has for many years remained aloof from persistent legal troubles that reportedly would land him in jail if not for the lengthy state of emergency in Israel that has so far indemnified Netanyahu from such inconvenient pressure.

Is it too much to analogise the situations of Putin, Netanyahu and Trump? Rick had some thoughts.

“Well, these three contemporary leaders do share some attitudes. They all seem to regard elections and even domestic dissent as inconveniences that should be ignored, if not forcibly eliminated. And they are all dogged by persistent problems at home.

“Putin clearly wants to return Russia to the glory years of the Cold War where it shared the apex of the world political and military order with the United States. But as he has pursued that aim in Crimea and now Ukraine, the Russian economy is being decimated by the crippling expense of his Ukraine war and by the international sanctions that have resulted.

“Netanyahu has long lusted for a territorial expansion of Israel into the West Bank of the Jordan River, Golan Heights and Gaza that would buffer his nation’s security posture. But he and his wife have for years faced charges of bribery and political corruption that have threatened them both with prison time.

“Trump, lest we forget, was twice impeached and faced numerous ruinous lawsuits relating not only to his official conduct as president but also in his personal life.

“Is it a coincidence that Putin and Netanyahu are among the leaders Trump appears to most sympathise with?”