Jamel Bouie

You can still lose.

And I do not think that they understand that in the least, or at least they're not expressing any understanding of that publicly.

When I watch Hexeth in particular, I don't think he understands that.

Here's the problem.

Because of this understanding that blowing stuff up and killing people is the objective of war, not the things you have to do to attain your larger strategic goal, it seems to me that whatever victory they're going to declare, it's going to be after just...

blowing stuff up.

They might look for some even more dramatic way to blow stuff up.

And then they can say, oh, well, we've done so much destruction that we can say that the war is over.

And that, to me, is the only conceivable exit ramp for them, given their own mindset.

And I'll conclude this by just noting, the reason I say this doesn't just extend to the war is because you see this way of thinking all over their actions with regard to domestic politics.

that's especially true with the use of ice and customs and border protection.

They seem to think that if you can just sort of like hit people hard enough that they'll stop.

And they don't seem to get that, A, the people you're hitting have their own designs, their own things they're trying to accomplish.

But B, you have to have some larger goals, some larger aim beyond just hitting really hard.

And if you don't have that, then someone who can take a punch will just keep taking the punch.

If you are opposed to the administration, you can just be aggressive towards them because they just don't expect it, right?

The DHS shutdown to me is a perfect example of this.

It's very clear that both the White House and their Republican allies in Congress were like, well, enough chaos at airports will just force Democrats to bend.

And they didn't.

which is just sort of a victory for the Democratic strategy here, the White House in particular didn't expect this and didn't know how to respond when Democrats were like, no, we're not going to back down.