The Bill For the Unintended Consequences of Bipartisan Political Cynicism Is Coming Due

Gayle Leslie
7 min readJan 5, 2020

In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran,” Donald J. Trump tweeted in 2011

Capitol Hill

There is a professional “consultant class” inside the Washington DC Beltway made up of Democrats and Republicans, dominated mostly by upwardly mobile white men. A well-coifed, erudite crew who’s only job it is to “spin.”

These guys are the definition of the “metrosexual.” Sharp suits, slick pricey haircuts, weekly mani-pedis and fat electronic Rolodexes filled with politicians on the fly, media figures, and low-profile gatekeepers. They pontificate endlessly on decisions and initiatives. And, since they’re getting paid a lot of money to preen on the now 24/7 talk show circuit and political “twitter-sphere,” they’ve become overly prone to fabricating narratives, some amounting to conspiracies, out of thin air. Generating theories to, say, get some hypothetical edge in an upcoming election.

Not so long ago the Republican consulting class integrated Trump’s own cynical calculation that, if all else failed in the Trump’s administration, the “go to” for re-election is to start a war with Iran.

To be fair, some of the sharp dressed men in media make a real attempt in adversarial circumstances to get outside the echo chamber. Andrew Napolitano on Fox News broke with Trump loyalists when they insisted that Trump wouldn’t incite war with Iran some time ago.

“In 2020, Trump will … start a war with Iran….more American troops will be deployed around the world than are today” by the end of the new year.

Credit where credit is do, but his boss did not like it.

The Obama Administration made it a particularly heavy lift for Donald Trump to precipitate a war with Iran by signing off on the Iran nuclear de-escalation deal. This as opposed to simply bombing a sovereign nation in a volatile part of the world. The deal meant that Trump would have to commit to destabilizing the U.S. relationship with Iran by abandoning the nuclear agreement, then sufficiently destabilizing the broader region — i.e. throwing the Kurds under the bus in Syria — to ultimately force tensions to such an untenable point that he could justify — to whatever extent his addled…

Gayle Leslie

Author of “Dwelling in the Vast Divine.1 & .2" Political consultant, policy wonk. https://www.amazon.com/Dwelling-Vast-Divine-1-Serialized-Memoir/dp/1495477746