I should add that I think his Trump comments are beside the point. He is a war criminal among war criminals, maybe slightly less hawkish than Clinton would have been, but that's all meaningless hypothesis at this point, and if it's not intended as a whitewash, I don't know why he brought it up. The assassination of Iranian general is a major and dangerous escalation, and that's all on Trump, as are US crimes throughout the middle east for the past 3 years. To say the "Benghazi Embassy disaster left a deep scar upon the psyche of Trump’s support base in particular" is just pure silliness imo, if not oblique Trump apologetics. If his supporters care/cared about that trivial event at all, they probably rejoiced to have a debacle to blame on Obama/Clinton. Deep scar, my ass.