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by thisislife2·1mo ago·view on hn ↗
Most of the Trump bashing online is indeed based on some political ignorance of how he operates (or just the usual propaganda from the opposition). In some ways, Trump's team is to blame for this because when you deliberately ignore established political conventions, you automatically bring more attention to yourself. Now, Trump does want that attention and believes he politically benefits from it. But, as your dismay as a supporter suggests, everyone is discovering that this kind of attention is double-edged and not always necessarily positive for him. Is that a fair point?

Now, on the current Iran affair, whether you like Trump or not, you have to agree that it hasn't gone as planned. If you wish to discuss this you should share more details - please outline, honestly, which criticism directed at Trump are reasonable and which one are really unjustified, in your opinion?

1 comments
My general point is not directed at Trump though, the general pattern I think is just the media turning every word coming from him into a weapon and it's kind of a tradition now. I'm more concerned about how people see the adversary, are they even see them as an adversary? I think that's actually the reason this didn't go as planned. Because people treat Iran as a democratic country and think US should be just and fair in their actions towards them. But you have to understand you are not dealing with a normal actor (there's a lot to be said about that which I'm not going to get into). If you fail to see that, of course you'd blame the very next thing the media is talking about.
Actions not words. Iran has been extremely retrained and disciplined here. USA and Israel attacked it unprovoked, and repeatedly broke "ceasefires" by literally bombing and killing Iranian leaders during a ceasefire. It's clear which is a normal actor and which isn't.
> It's clear which is a normal actor and which isn't.

Just in case you read this, something I learned over time is that the truth you believe as reality is just as good as the information that reaches you. If you get your news from this internet like I do, I wouldn't count on it.

The internet is irrelevant to it, its widely reported in both traditional media too who lied and broke ceasefires to kill the leaders of the other side.
> ... the general pattern I think is just the media turning every word coming from him into a weapon

Oh, "polarised" media now seems to be the norm around the world, and not just the US. So at one end, you have Fox News parroting Republican conservatism, while the Washington Post peddles for the Democrat Right- (here's one such example of the Washington Post engaging in pointless Trump bashing without a meaningful journalistic examination of the whole issue - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/could-ukraine-have-avoid... ). The whole idea of dispassionate, if not neutral, journalism is dead today because of corporate owned media and BigTech's stranglehold on social media through which modern "news" spreads.

Also, most politically aware Americans know that there is an unspoken bi-partisan rule in the western / US media - you can never criticise Israel without prior political approval. (AIPAC, and other Israeli pressure groups, further offer incentives through ad spends to ensure this kind of media compliancy). When you factor that too into the equation, it becomes clear why Trump has become the punching bag in the media. Out of the two actors in this conflict - Israel and the US / Trump - that the Americans / west care about, the US media can act unrestrained against only one of them. Thus, the current US administration bears the brunt. And it doesn't help that it is election season too, as that is when the US media tend to be the most polarised ...

> I'm more concerned about how people see the adversary ...

Here, you cannot ignore the other irrational actor involved - Israel / Netanyahu.

Sympathy for Iran, in the west, mainly stems from comparison to Israel whose current leaders and soldiers have unfortunately projected the worst of humanity with its vulgarity and depravity in its ongoing war. If this were just a conflict between Iran and the US, Iran wouldn't have been able to arouse so much sympathy for itself. But Israel / Netanyahu have muddied the water so much with their ongoing genocide that anyone associated with them cannot escape the taint too. You'd think their blood lust would have been satisfied with the 20,000+ children they've already killed ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167790 ) , but no, the IDF nutcases are now shooting babies too ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/10/palestinian-ba... ) - don't Iranians look like saints in comparison to that?.

(Disclaimer: I too sympathise with the Palestinians and Iranians now, where as I was indifferent towards them before).