Trump warned Ira​n will hurt him even more than Epstein: 'Could split his party in half'

President Donald Trump's invasion of Iran might actually do more damage to his electoral coalition than his mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, former Republican strategist Tim Miller told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Monday's edition of "Deadline: White House."

Miller claimed the president has a "megalomaniacal belief in himself."

"He believes that he's the tough guy, the bully on the playground, and that he can go around and do this stuff and not suffer any consequences. And there's this machismo that goes along with it that is, you know, been part of the fascist impulse forever. This is what Umberto Eco wrote about Mussolini, right? Was that there's just this machismo. It's like, I can do this, this bravado. And he, I think, has found himself a situation that he can't spin or demagogue his way out of with his own base."

"I mean, he could leave right now, and you would still only have the six deaths, which would be tragic, of Americans," said Miller. "Obviously, they've been Iranian deaths and others in the region. And so I guess maybe that people would just forget about it and move on. But I think this is just a fundamental betrayal ... I think it's totally a different category than Epstein. I mean, like, it was essential to the rise of Trump."

Miller added that he saw this himself, working for the Jeb Bush campaign in 2016 before Trump defeated them to take command of the GOP — and one way Trump did that, he noted, is calling the Bush family warmongers.

"I was wrong. He was correct," said Miller. "People were sick of it and they were willing to turn to somebody as vulgar and unserious as him, because what they were being offered otherwise was Clinton, Bush and a similar foreign policy that the American people had decided had failed and that they didn't want anymore. And so it was the central item, maybe in addition to immigration, to his rise." Now, he is pushing "a regime change war in the Middle East that has no rationale at all, like he can't even give his people a fig leaf about what this is for."

"You know, look, I think that some of them will stick with him for a little bit because, you know, people don't like to admit that they're wrong and it's a team jersey and all of that," added Miller. "But if this continues to get worse and he gets into a quagmire, like this could really be the issue that doesn't — you know, we spent a lot of time on here talking about issues where it's like, well, could could he go from 85 percent down to 80 with his base? You know, could he go from 92 down to 80 like, this is the issue that could that could split the base in half. It could split his party in half."

"It is the central thing that he promised to his voters," said Miller. "And he is just doing exactly the opposite in a way that is kind — that is hard for me to really even understand what how he could have, how he could have judged this to be something that his own base would accept."

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