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[Salon] The bipartisan card - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
The bipartisan card
Summary: in the wake of the historic drubbing the Republican Party suffered in Tuesday’s mid-term elections the Democrats hold within their grasp the way to pull the United States out of the war quagmire Trump dragged the country into but to do so they will have to play a smart hand.
Much has been made of US Vice President J.D Vance’s X text in which he unequivocally blames the Republican mid-term disaster on the Iran war. He didn’t blame his president, the man who launched the war nor did he do an ‘I told you so’ tempting though it may have been. Vance was a lone cabinet voice opposed to the war when it was first bruited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and enthusiastically embraced by Trump’s Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth as a quick hit victory: regime overthrown, in and out in two to three weeks, job done. Another Venezuela. The vice president fell into line but he was less and less enamoured of Donald Trump’s “excursion” as the war ground on. He bided his time, though, waiting for the moment to distance himself from the president’s decision to go to war. The mid-term rout was his moment. He, along with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, have broken from the pack early in staking claims to the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.
What has been little commented on is the poll that Vance cited in his text. According to the vice president the unnamed pollster - “one of the smartest people I know in politics” - told him that “we’d lose the generic vote by 13 points.” Vance wrote he was shocked by this and proceeded to ask the pollster why previous Trump supporters were switching their votes to the Democrats. The pollster asked those voters what would cause them to get back onside. They gave four reasons:
End the war
Focus on cost of living/inflation
Put America first
Change our relationship to Israel.
Following the Republican Party's historic mid-term defeat - driven by conservative voter backlash against the war with Iran, economic distress, and uncritical backing of Israel - figures like J.D. Vance and dissident Republicans are openly breaking ranks, while efforts mount to impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
As Vance noted: “our voters showed up and the above four reasons are why they voted for the Democrats.” He chose to jump on number 1 but number 4, in tandem with the others, played a big role in what looks like a mass defection of GOP voters. And while Republicans in Congress were not as seriously fractured as were the Democrats over Israel they were apparently unaware of how fractured their own voters were and how badly Netanyahu’s war of genocide was playing with MAGA and the American Firsters.
The former Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who had been chased by Trump out of Congress for the lese majeste sin of calling out Israel’s brutal war was not shy in blaming the president for Tuesday’s debacle. “He told people to vote like he was on the ballot and they did,” was her opening jibe. She accused him of multiple sins including the coverup of the Epstein files and “putting his rich elite donors before the struggling Americans who put him in office.” She noted that “Trump ran me and Thomas Massie out of the Congress and our Republican colleagues stayed silent.”
Massie is now seeking the scalp of Hegseth the self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ and he was talking about an approach that is - post November 3 - no longer a dirty word in DC: bipartisanship. He has said he will trigger an impeachment vote as early as next week that will see Republicans join the Democrats in ousting a Secretary of Defence who is seen on both sides of the House as grossly incompetent. It is a convenient way for Republicans still frightened of Trump to express their anger at the mid-term results by defenestrating the hapless Hegseth.
And bipartisanship might, just might, provide a path for Trump to get himself out of the Iran war and out of the deathly embrace of Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby in the US led by AIPAC. If the Democrats play a smart hand they will hold off going down the vengeance path. They will say to the president ‘we offer a way for you to salvage your legacy. We won’t bang on about the fact that you started the war. Heck we will applaud you for ending it. And as for Israel and how it has massively damaged your base and with it your reputation don’t just virtue signal. Tell whoever emerges from the political dustup now engaged there - be it Eisenkot or Netanyahu - that enough is enough. America is through funding your war against the Palestinian people. It must stop.’
Playing to Trump’s ego, giving him off ramps for Iran and Israel, may work. Or it may not. But those Republicans who survived the November 3 rout are looking to 2028. Bipartisanship may be the only card they have left to play.
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