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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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With little electricity, no combat pay and holidays away from home, the 5,600 American troops on the southwest border are on a mission ordered by a politically determined commander in chief and a Pentagon unable to convince him of its perils.
Come Thanksgiving, they most likely will still be here.
Two thousand miles away, at the Pentagon, officials privately derided the deployment as an expensive waste of time and resources, and a morale killer to boot.
Leading up to the midterm vote on Tuesday, the military announced that the border mission would be called Operation Faithful Patriot. But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Election Day told officials to drop the name, and the Pentagon sent out a terse news release a day later saying the operation was now simply to be known as border support. The term “faithful patriot,” officials said, had political overtones.
A final cost estimate of the deployment has not been made available. But Defense Department budget officials fret that if the number of troops sent to the border does reach 15,000, the price tag could hit $200 million, with no specific budget allocation from which to draw.
WASHINGTON — Turkey said on Saturday that it had turned over audio recordings of the brutal killing of a Saudi journalist to the United States and other Western countries, intensifying the pressure on President Trump to take stronger punitive steps against his allies in Saudi Arabia.
The disclosure, made by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was his first public acknowledgment of the existence of recordings of the murder of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last month. Saudi Arabia has acknowledged that its operatives killed Mr. Khashoggi but denied that the attack was ordered at the top levels of the royal court.
“We gave them the tapes,” Mr. Erdogan said at a news conference in Ankara before flying to Paris to join Mr. Trump and other leaders at an international gathering. “They’ve also listened to the conversations, they know it. There is no need to distort this.”
The White House declined to say whether it had a copy of the recording. But if true, Mr. Erdogan’s claim puts Mr. Trump in a deeply awkward position, suggesting he possesses direct evidence of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, even as he has resisted tough sanctions against the Saudis and declined to say exactly who he believes was responsible for the crime.
PARIS — President Trump flew 3,800 miles to this French capital city for ceremonies to honor the military sacrifice in World War I, hoping to take part in the kind of powerful ode to the bravery of the armed forces that he was unable to hold in Washington.
But on his first full day here, it rained on his substitute parade weekend.
Early Saturday, the White House announced Trump and the first lady had scuttled plans, due to bad weather, for their first stop in a series of weekend remembrance activities — a visit to the solemn Aisne Marne American Cemetery, marking the ferocious Battle of Belleau Wood.
It was not completely clear why the Trumps were unable to attend. The cemetery is 50 miles from Paris. So perhaps the president was planning to travel on Marine One, which is occasionally grounded by the Secret Service.
But the sight of dignitaries arriving at other sites outside Paris, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, led some foreign policy analysts to speculate that the U.S. commander in chief just wasn’t up for it.
“It’s incredible that a president would travel to France for this significant anniversary — and then remain in his hotel room watching TV rather than pay in person his respects to the Americans who gave their lives in France for the victory gained 100 years ago tomorrow,” David Frum, who served as a speechwriter to former president George W. Bush, wrote in a series of tweets. Trump is actually staying at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris.
Trump is still planning to attend the featured ceremony under the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday where more than 100 world leaders will pay homage to the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Great War.
But he won’t really get a parade. The event will not feature tanks or missiles like the parade Trump had envisioned on the streets of Washington on Veterans Day, but canceled due to exorbitant costs.
And, after another scheduled visit to a ceremony on Sunday, the president plans to fly home just as Macron’s Paris Peace Forum kicks off for three-days of meetings aimed at galvanizing global action on shared challenges, such as climate change.
Thomas Wright, a Europe expert at the Brookings Institution, noted that Trump announced he was going to France on a whim in August after abruptly canceling his order for the Pentagon to stage a parade.
The Peace Forum was intended “a bit as a counterpoint to ‘America first,’” Wright said, referring to Trump’s nationalist foreign policy in which he has unsettled allies on trade and defense. “Now they have this weird situation of Trump being there [in Paris] but the forum going against everything he and [national security adviser John] Bolton stand for . . . My impression is that he’s going to pretend like it’s not happening.”
Trump’s critics, including former national security aides under President Barack Obama, piled on — payback, perhaps, for all the times Trump had ridiculed Obama by calling him feckless and weak on the world stage.
In the two years since his election, Trump has not visited troops in an active war zone — an attempt to make a surprise visit to the Korean demilitarized zone last November was aborted when https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/11/07/trumps-attempt-at-surprise-visit-to-korean-demilitarized-zone-foiled-by-bad-weather/?utm_term=.8bc6487d30e3 (Marine One was forced to turn around) due to bad weather.
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