The Ego Has Landed: Why Trump Damaged Himself Tonight

Apologies. I have no idea why I indulged myself to write so long to make such a simple point. Long story short: You can't tell people they've been flat wrong about everything for 17 years, without giving the slightest reason why they should change their entire scheme of thinking, and expect them to support you.

This was a brief line in the podcast (which we'll post tomorrow) which I expanded, for reasons I can now no longer guess, into a 1500 word exegesis on the obvious.

The "ego" in the headline doesn't actually refer to Trump's ego, for once. Rather, it refers to the voters' egos.

I think Trump hurt himself badly tonight, enough to knock him out of his first-place standing in most states. Oh he won't completely disappear -- but 2nd Place Trump is not the same thing as Frontrunner Trump.

Trump damaged himself with his claim that Bush lied us into war in Iraq. Not botched the intelligence, not read too much into thin intelligence.

First, this is alarming because it once again demonstrates that Trump has a conspiratorial mind. It's not enough for the conspiracist to say someone was wrong -- no, they have unrealistically black/white minds, and if you made a bad call, you must have lied.

That conspiracism was always present in his claims about Obama's birth certificate. But that bit of fantasy was about Obama, someone the average Republican voter isn't exactly eager to man the battlements for.

This corker -- this Al Gore roar of quote -- is about George W. Bush, someone still looked upon with affection by most of the party.

If Donald Trump is right, and George W. Bush deliberately schemed with his neo-con advisers to "lie" us into a phony war with Iraq, what does that say about the average Republican voter who supported Bush from 1999, voted for him, defended him through the recount, cried with him on 9/11, agreed with him on Iraq, defended him from ceaseless liberal attacks on him during the war, defended him from Obama's never-expiring "Blame Bush" blame-shifting, etc.?

If Trump is right, then we're not just wrong to have supported him. If Trump's right, we're goddamned rubes and fools to have defended this Actual Hitler-Level Monster for going on 17 years now.

People want to think well of themselves, and they wish to vote in a way that makes them think well of themselves. It's a critical goal in every campaign to convince the public that voting for this candidate is the Smart, Virtuous, Good thing to do, because people will vote in a way that enables them to luxuriate their egos.

That's how Barack Obama got elected. The media convinced people that they became smart and virtuous and good just by voting for this layabout pinko incompetent.

A good leader will challenge people, and that sometimes requires posing a threat to their egos. By telling someone they are wrong-- or at least aren't thinking about things quite straight --one is attacking their ego.

But someone adroit in persuasion understands when he is in fact attacking the core of someone's sense of self-worth, and does so cautiously, deploying all the reason and tactfulness he can marshal into the effort.

He attacks that person's ego to the smallest extent compatible with his goal (changing the person's mind), and offers him good reasons to change his mind.

He thus offers a lateral move, if you will, from one state of self-valuation to another. You give up on this one way of thinking, which would usually cause some psychic strain to the ego, but, on the other hand, you have been convinced of the rectitude of this other way of thinking. By moving to that new way of thinking, you gain a level of self-worth, so you're net even on the deal. (You might even gain some sense of self-worth for having been smart enough to recognize a good argument and having been openminded enough to consider it.)

It is very unpersuasive, on the other hand, to offer someone a flat contradiction of something they've long believed while offering no reason at all to accept a new replacement belief, except the assertion of it.

Abandoning the old position is damaging to one's sense of self-worth -- how could I have gotten it wrong for so long? But no easy glide-path to the new way of thinking is offered.

You sort of have to just knuckle under someone's flat assertion -- and subordinating oneself to another's claims, with no good reasons for such subordination offered, is even more hostile to the ego than being wrong.

This is a long way of saying Trump specifically and completely contradicted a belief that 75-80% of Republicans have about Bush -- that he was a fundamentally decent man, perhaps overwhelmed by a very difficult period, who made an erroneous decision based on incomplete information -- and instead offered a new belief, that Bush deliberately lied about Iraq's WMD's, a position that 75-80% of Republicans have long not only rejected but have been actively hostile towards.

With no better reason to adopt this new claim other than that Donald Trump said it.

I doubt very much people will be willing to make this leap with Trump. Gathering political support is all about getting a buy-in of belief at a price that people are willing to pay (usually, a low price-- that's why politicians strain to parrot back to you things you already believe).

I think Trump, who has been a past-master at getting people to buy-in to a very low-cost premise -- "Let's Make America Great Again" -- just made a very high cost premise central to buying into him.

And I think for that reason that many people will be taking a second look at Trump -- and not in a good "second look" way. I think they'll be evaluating things they previously gave him passes on -- donations to Hilary, Reid, Pelosi, etc.; support for partial birth abortion; support for single-peer health care-- and re-evaluate those facts while keeping in mind Trump's big new premise that Republicans supported, voted for, defended, and sustained an actual war criminal who made war on a country he knew to be innocent of the claim he dishonestly profferred against it, for who knows what sinister gain.

We'll see if he tries walking this one back, and to what extent he's successful.

If it is now a part of the agenda that we actually have to buy into all the claims Gore, Pelosi, Obama, etc. made for years, I think this new agenda is going to turn out to be too highly priced for most Republican voters.

And Don't Even Get Me Started on Tribal Signaling. I was just telling someone that every campaign boils down to two four word claims:

Dress it up however you like, the subconscious messaging in every election is just that.

With just a few poorly chosen angry words, Trump declared a lot of allegiance to the enemy tribe, and essentially said "I'm not like you."

Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD

This is the report that Dubya commissioned from the Iraq Survey Group. Bush accepts this report as being accurate. That's why Dubya agrees that no WMDs were found. You may want to send Dubya your data, maybe you can change his mind.

"Key Findings (Nuclear)

"Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

" Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.
"Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

(Biological)

"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level. "

(Chemical)

" Saddam and many Iraqis regarded CW as a proven weapon against an enemyâ€™s superior numerical strength, a weapon that had saved the nation at least once alreadyâ€”during the Iran-Iraq warâ€”and contributed to deterring the Coalition in 1991 from advancing to Baghdad.

"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad's desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

"The scale of the Iraqi conventional munitions stockpile, among other factors, precluded an examination of the entire stockpile; however, ISG inspected sites judged most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.

"Transmittal Message

"Evidence. The problem of discerning WMD in Iraq is highlighted by the prewar misapprehensions of weapons, which were not there. Distant technical analysts mistakenly identified evidence and drew incorrect conclusions."

C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons FEB. 15, 2015
The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.
The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United Statesâ€™ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Husseinâ€™s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Armyâ€™s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.
The buying of nerve-agent rockets from an Iraqi seller in 2006 was the most significant recovery of chemical weapons until that point in the Iraq War.
A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the government kept much of this information secret, from the public and troops alike.
These munitions were remnants of an Iraqi special weapons program that was abandoned long before the 2003 invasion, and they turned up sporadically during the American occupation in buried caches, as part of improvised bombs or on black markets.
The potency of sarin samples from the purchases, as well as tightly held assessments about risks the munitions posed, buttresses veteransâ€™ claims that during the war the military did not share important intelligence about battlefield perils with those at risk or maintain an adequate medical system for treating victims of chemical exposure.
The purchases were made from a sole Iraqi source who was eager to sell his stock, officials said. The amount of money that the United States paid for the rockets is not publicly known, and neither are the affiliations of the seller.
Most of the officials and veterans who spoke about the program did so anonymously because, they said, the details remain classified. The C.I.A. declined to comment. The Pentagon, citing continuing secrecy about the effort, did not answer written questions and acknowledged its role only obliquely.
â€œWithout speaking to any specific programs, it is fair to say that together with our coalition partners in Iraq, the U.S. military worked diligently to find and remove weapons that could be used against our troops and the Iraqi people,â€ Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a written statement.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Richard P. Zahner, the top American military intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said he did not know of any other intelligence program as successful in reducing the chemical weapons that remained in Iraq after the American-led invasion.
Through the C.I.A.â€™s purchases, General Zahner said, hundreds of weapons with potential use for terrorists were quietly taken off the market. â€œThis was a timely and effective initiative by our national intelligence partners that negated the use of these unique munitions,â€ he said.

“Then you aren’t one of the new “Bush lied people died” Freepers.”

No, I’m not. And I’m definitely not a Dubya fan, haven’t been since the Prop 187 fight back in 1994.

But it’s a leap of logic to say that he was lying. He would have had to have known that there were no WMDs.

He can be faulted for choosing to go to war when the WMD evidence was ambiguous or weak. He can be faulted for surrounding himself with advisors who were eager to depose Saddam Hussein- and who may well have cherry picked the intel passed along to Bush. He can be faulted for believing the utopian fantasy that the democracy project fools were selling. But that’s bad judgement, not dishonesty.

I suspect that the “Bush lied people died” crowd around here are just echoing Trump from the last debate.

Not long after Operation Avarice had secured its 400th rocket, in 2006, American troops were exposed several times to other chemical weapons. Many of these veterans said that they had not been warned by their units about the risks posed by the chemical weapons and that their medical care and follow-up were substandard, in part because military doctors seemed unaware that chemical munitions remained in Iraq.

In some cases, victims of exposure said, officers forbade them to discuss what had occurred. The Pentagon now says hundreds of other veterans reported on health-screening forms that they believed they too had been exposed during the war.

Aaron Stein, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said the belated acknowledgment of a chemical-rocket purchases, as well as the potentially worrisome laboratory analysis of the related sarin samples, raised questions about the militaryâ€™s commitment to the well-being of those it sent to war.

â€œIf we were aware of these compounds, and as it became clear over the course of the war that our troops had been exposed to them, why wasnâ€™t more done to protect the guys on the ground?â€ he said. â€œIt speaks to the broader failure.â€

The first purchase under Operation Avarice, according to veterans and officials familiar with the effort, occurred in early September 2005, when an Iraqi man provided a single Borak. The warhead presented intelligence analysts with fresh insight into a longstanding mystery.

During its war against Iran in the 1980s, Iraq had fielded multiple variants of 122-millimeter rockets designed to disperse nerve agents.

The Borak warheads, which are roughly 40 inches long and attach to a motor compatible with the common Grad multiple rocket launcher system, were domestically produced. But no clear picture ever emerged of how many Iraq manufactured or how many it fired during the Iran-Iraq war.

In confidential declarations in the 1990s to the United Nations, Iraq gave shifting production numbers, up to 18,500. It also claimed to have destroyed its remaining stock before international inspectors arrived after the Persian Gulf War.

Wikileaks documents show WMDs found in Iraq
In this case, the surprise isnâ€™t the data but the source. Wikileaksâ€™ new release from purloined files of the Department of Defense may help remind people that, contrary to popular opinion and media memes, the US did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and in significant quantities. While the invasion of Iraq didnâ€™t find huge stockpiles of new WMDs, it did uncover stockpiles that the UN had demanded destroyed as a condition of the 1991 truce that Saddam Hussein abrogated for twelve years (via Instapundit):

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesnâ€™t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime â€” the Bush administrationâ€™s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddamâ€™s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict â€” and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.
In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic â€œblister agentâ€ used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and â€œreported two positive results for blister.â€ The chemical was then â€œtriple-sealed and transported to a secure siteâ€ outside their base. â€¦
Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells â€œthat was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. â€œThe 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.â€ Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, â€œthe rounds tested positive for mustard.â€

Some of these discoveries have been known for years. To the extent that the media covered these at all, these finds were generally treated as long-forgotten leftovers that somehow never got addressed by the Iraqi military in twelve years of UN inspections. That, however, disregards completely the kind of totalitarian state that Hussein had imposed on Iraq, up to the minute that circumstances forced him into his spider hole in 2003. Had Saddam Hussein wanted those weapons destroyed, no lower-ranking military officer would have dared defy him by keeping them hidden. It would have taken dozens of officers to conspire to move and hide those weapons, as well as a like number of enlisted men, any and all of whom could have been a spy for the Hussein clique.
That would have had to have happened a number of times, not just once, organically arising in the ranks. And why create a vast conspiracy of defiance to save the weapons that Saddam Hussein liked the most while Hussein himself complied with the UN? Why not a conspiracy to just remove Hussein and his sons and let the military run the country instead? Obviously, Hussein wanted to keep enough WMDs to use as terror weapons, not against the US, but against Iran in the event of an invasion from the east.
This isnâ€™t exactly vindication of one of the arguments the Bush administration gave for invading Iraq, which was that Hussein had already begun stockpiling new WMDs and was working on nuclear weapons, but it is another vindication of the primary reason for restarting the war: Hussein and Iraq had violated the truce and refused to comply even after 17 UN resolutions demanding compliance. Hussein never had any intention of abiding by the truce, for whatever motivations one wants to assign to him. After the invasion, the US proved (through an armed-version of Wikileaks in Iraqâ€™s diplomatic files) that the UN had allowed Hussein to grab billions in personal wealth by perverting the embargo in the Oil-for-Food Program, which would have given Hussein the means to fuel another WMD program as soon as the West withdrew from Iraq, and to restart Husseinâ€™s dreams of pan-Arab dominance through military adventurism. In the end, there were no good options.

Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq
â€œThe idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false.â€ But donâ€™t expect them to admit it. From FoxNews, with thanks to Arjun:

WASHINGTON â€œâ€ The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.
â€œWe have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons,â€ Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.
Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: â€œSince 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraqâ€™s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.â€â€¦
â€œThis says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq,â€ said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s. But they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitionsâ€¦.
Santorum pointed out that during Wednesdayâ€™s debate, several Senate Democrats said that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, a claim, he said, that the declassified document proves is untrue.
â€œThis is an incredibly â€œâ€ in my mind â€œâ€ significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false,â€ he said.

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