10/27/19: Late Saturday, into Sunday, the president had one of his better moments as reluctant leader of the Free World. Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, Trump was able to march out in front of waiting cameras and announce that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS mastermind, during a well-planned, well-executed raid in northwestern Syria.
Let us pause a moment to agree, as Americans, as decent human beings: Good riddance to al-Baghdadi, a bloody murderer.
Unfortunately, the moment was blighted when the president (as always) made the story about him. First, as we have come to expect, there was a great deal of “ME, ME, ME” in his description of what transpired.
You may remember that it used to infuriate Citizen Trump, when President Obama took the slightest credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Later, when the man who planned and ordered that raid, Admiral William McRaven, joined the legions of his critics, Trump attacked him too. In an appearance on Fox News, in November 2018, our current president grumbled, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?”
(More on that in a moment.)
Speaking to the American people, Sunday morning, Trump offered a taste of his greatness. “I’ve been looking for him for three years,” Trump said, of al-Baghdadi. “I’ve been looking for him. I started getting some very positive feedback about a month ago, and we had some incredible intelligence officials that did a great job.”
Trump clearly seemed to be hogging the credit; but would his chat get stranger? We’ve seen this before. If he was going to grab all the glory that he was sure he deserved, Mr. Trump would have to make his success sound bigger and better than the success of his predecessor. Yes, the U.S. military got Osama bin Laden, in May 2011. But this killing of al-Baghdadi, with the great Donald J. Trump in charge, “this is the biggest there is,” he insisted, when it came to rating killings.
Of course, you might remember, back in the day,
when Obama got Osama, that Trump poo-pooed his success. How long had it taken
him to find the leader of Al Qaeda! Good god. Obama had been in office for two
years, and three months, when Seal Team Six surrounded the hideout of the mastermind
of the 9/11 attacks and filled him with well-deserved bullet holes.
Trump decided that since he was standing before a bank of cameras, he should mention “a really very successful book” he wrote, before anyone else knew who Osama bin Laden was. Trump wanted us to appreciate his prescience:
I’m
writing a book. World Trade Center had not come down...And I’m saying to people
take out Osama bin Laden, that nobody ever heard of. I mean, al-Baghdadi
everybody hears of because he’s built this monster for a long time. But nobody
ever heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center. But about a
year before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out. I was talking
about Osama bin Laden. I said, “You have to kill him. You have to take him
out.” Nobody listened to me.
Clearly, the president was excited to have a chance to talk about something besides how he held up military aid to the Ukrainians to force them to help him in the 2020 election. “If you read my book,” he continued, “there’s a book just before the World Trade Center came down, and I don’t get any credit for this, but that’s okay, I never do. But here we are. A very, very successful book,” he said. “If they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different.”
“I wrote 12 books, all did very well,” he added. Had he
mentioned how great he was? He was a great author, too.
*
EITHER WAY, GOOD WORK, America’s fighting men and women! We wouldn’t quibble here, on this blog, except to take note again of Trump’s shameless hypocrisy. Back when Seal Team Six was killing the terrorist leader, Citizen Trump loved to tweet his disdain. “Stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden,” he objected. “The Navy Seals killed Bin Laden.”
Fox News agreed, of course. No credit for Obama!!!
“The military and Navy Seals should be given more credit for Bin Laden’s death, not Obama, who works hard to take all the credit away from them,” Trump grumbled in another tweet.
Trump even washed up on the shores of CNN for a chat with Wolf Blitzer. Bah! Obama! What did he have to do with military success in killing Osama? “But anybody sitting in that office, Wolf, would have – I keep hearing about, oh, bin Laden, the military did an incredible job and they called and they said, we have him. And he [Obama] said, go get him,” Trump complained.
Obama did nothing.
“What’s he going to say, don’t get him? And he gets all this credit? It’s a lot of crap,” Trump continued.
Eleven months later, he was still bitching about
President Obama and the raid that killed bin Laden.
Trump later decided he didn't like Admiral McRaven either.
*
THAT WAS THEN; and this was now; and President Trump was painting himself as the great man of action.
This was his chance to revel in glory and describe the attack
in gory detail. U.S. troops, he explained, flew in on eight helicopters, across
dangerous territory. Some of that territory was controlled by Russian forces.
The U.S. military had to notify them to avoid trouble. Trump thanked Russia for
its cooperation.
(He
really likes Russia.)
Landing near a compound where the leader of ISIS was hiding, our brave soldiers blew a hole in the wall, rather than risk entering by a possibly booby-trapped main entrance. Trump said he saw it all from the White House Situation Room, “like watching a movie.” The attackers exchanged fire with a number of ISIS fighters, wiped them out, and suffered no casualties, save for one of their dogs. That dog was “a beautiful dog,” the president said, and that dog was injured. But that dog was a hero. And that dog was following orders from President Trump, who was the real hero.
Luckily, that dog didn’t have bone spurs.
Al-Baghdadi headed for a tunnel. He had three of his children with him. He was wearing a suicide vest. But the tunnel was a dead end. The ISIS leader was trapped. Just the way Trump planned it! He blew himself to bits. Also, his children. His body, Trump told the American people, was torn to pieces. So were theirs’. He skipped over that detail. It took a sophisticated DNA test to prove the bit and pieces were him. Boy, oh boy, Trump wanted us to know. He killed the head of ISIS.
It was like he was there, leading the attack himself. What a
hero Donald John Trump was. Were reporters getting all of this down on paper?
Naturally, the president had to talk smack. He called al-Baghdadi’s followers “losers” and “frightened puppies.” Their leader “died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering, screaming and crying all the way…He died like a dog, he died like a coward, he was whimpering, screaming and crying,” Trump repeated. “And frankly, I think it’s something that should be brought out.”
All in all, it was a typical Trumpian performance. The president explained that he had not called Democratic leaders to notify them about the raid. He said he didn’t want leaks. Sure, he notified the Russians. But could you trust Pelosi? Trump wanted us to know he didn’t think you could. He thanked the Russians and Turks for allowing the raid to go off without interference. He skipped over the Kurds, however, even though tips from their informants provided the U.S.A. with critical information necessary to pinning down al-Baghdadi’s location.
(Trump
doesn’t like the Kurds anymore.)
This also seemed like a perfect time to attack our European allies, because they refused to take the thousands of ISIS prisoners – the ones the Kurds had been guarding until Trump pulled our forces out of northern Syria. As for the work of U.S. intelligence in locating the feared ISIS leader, Trump thought he should mention he was often forced to work with “people who aren’t very intelligent having to do with intel.”
In closing, Trump called the leader of ISIS a “gutless animal.” “Thank you all very much,” he told reporters. “I appreciate it.”
And off he went, probably to find a mirror and gaze in wonder
at his own glorious, orange reflection.
*
SPEAKING OF HEROES, at almost the same moment, when the president was trumpeting his own greatness, Jack Tapper, on Face the Nation, was talking to officers who had served with Ambassador Bill Taylor, when he was a young U.S. Army officer, dodging bullets in Vietnam.
In the view of men like retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an old comrade, Taylor was a hero, not “human scum.” (See: 10/22-24/19.)
A true hero.
*
SUNDAY NIGHT, Trump showed up for Game 5 of the World Series, between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros. Here he was! The conquering commander-in-chief. Yet, when his image appeared on the big screen at the D.C. ballpark, he was roundly booed.
Then the crowd began to chant, “Lock him up! Lock him up!” which you figure ruined his mood – now that he had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with his own bare, orange hands.
Critics noticed that the president had invited several toadies to attend the game, including Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. John Ratcliffe. Barron Trump, his 13-year-old son, was not in attendance.
So, Trump sucked at being a dad.
Some pundits defended the president and insisted, short of trial and conviction, that Americans should not be shouting, “Lock him up!” or “Lock her up!” at any American citizen, including Big Don. This blogger certainly agrees one should never demand that anyone be locked up, until that other person has been found guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even then, one should be wary of mistakes in the justice system.
But one might well take a certain degree of pleasure in
seeing Trump’s tactics turned against him.
POSTSCRIPT: When Admiral McRaven criticized
Trump in an opinion piece in The New York Times a few days before, the
president suddenly realized that McRaven didn’t deserve credit for killing
Osama either. It took Obama and McRaven two years, three months to get Osama.
What crap!
Whereas he got Al-Baghdadi quick! In only two years, nine
months, which, according to Trump Math, is faster.
(See:
2/7/20, for an explanation of the miracles possible
with Trump Math.)
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