AL MAGA DADDY
AL MAGA Daddy
The killing of an international terrorist on the FBI’s most-wanted list would be a win for any president and an opportunity to be presidential. In moments of successes like this, as it was For President Obama with the death of Osama bin Laden or even a failure like the one Jimmy Carter suffered from a failed mission to rescue hostages from Tehran, presidents become presidential. While the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump had a desperately needed win and he proceeded to mess it up even before the announcement.
Before the raid by American special ops, Trump messed up by not informing key members of Congress, citing that he can’t trust them not to leak. But, he informed Russia. In fact, he thanked Russia even though they didn’t have anything to do with the raid. Before he made the announcement, he tweeted a hint which gave the entire world a huge clue as to what happened. From “Something very big has just happened!” you’d think had just killed a major terrorist or was bragging about using his pull-ups successfully all by himself for the first time.
Donald Trump could have just delivered the information but he turned it into editorializing which amounted to preening. He claimed Baghdadi was “screaming, crying, and whimpering, “and he was scared out of his mind,” and he “died like a dog,” and “died like a coward.” While no one is going to mourn the death of this brutal terrorist, Trump threw away American honor and dignity with his childish taunts and insults, even if his claims are true. As Michael Leiter, who led the US National Counterterrorism Center from 2007 to 2011, told VOX, “Highlighting and repeating that language is not especially dignified for the United States. We should always take a higher moral ground, and talking about an individual’s death is not particularly productive. What the president should’ve spent more time on was highlighting ISIS’s atrocities, like the killing of the Jordanian pilot. That’s appropriate: It shows that ISIS wasn’t at war with the West, it was at war with all peoples who are civilized, including Muslims who don’t adhere to their extremely strict view of Sunni Islam.”
Trump claimed he couldn’t trust Democrats in Congress not to leak and inform ISIS it was coming, yet he may have revealed classified information during his braggadocious press conference. The biggest danger is that Trump may have tipped off future targets describing the information our nation had Baghdadi’s compound, which teaches them how to avoid death and capture from future raids.
The mission was named after Kayla Mueller, a victim of the terrorist. Her mother praised Trump and said if “Obama had been as decisive as Trump” her daughter may still be alive. But, as it turns out, the mission was delayed and complicated by Trump pulling our troops out of Syria. This mission was conducted from Iraq. The mission was made possible by intelligence provided by Kurdish allies, who Donald Trump has abandoned and given Turkey the green light to slaughter.
Trump used the opportunity to praise his travel ban, despite there not being any ISIS attacks in the United States by anyone traveling from any of the nations on his travel-ban list.
Trump also claimed that nobody heard of Osama bin Laden before 9/11, yet he warned the country it needed to “take him out” in one of his crappy books he didn’t write, a year and a half before planes flew into the World Trade Center. He insinuated 9/11 may not have ever happened if the U.S. had listened to his advice, and complained that he doesn’t receive credit.
Uh, his book, The America we Deserve (gag), does mention bin Laden but it doesn’t say anything about “taking him out.” And maybe Trump voters never heard of bin Laden before 9/11, but America was aware of him. He was in international news. He had committed major attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa and on the U.S.S. Cole. There had been attempts to take him out in 1998 before Trump’s book was published. I’m mostly shocked that he didn’t plug that Trump Tower became the tallest building in New York City after 9/11, which he has done before.
Trump also attacked the intelligence community, saying, “I’ve dealt with some people that aren’t very intelligent, having to do with intel.” Never mind the fact that we learned of Baghdadi’s whereabouts from…wait for it…intelligence.
Trump also compared Baghdadi’s death to bin Laden’s, stating “his killing” was a bigger deal than Obama’s.
Obama took nine minutes to announce the killing of bin Laden. Trump took nearly an hour because he needed all that time to take credit. So naturally, in the past, Trump said Obama didnt’ deserve any credit for the killing of bin Laden. He had tweeted, “Stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden. The Navy Seals killed Bin Laden.” He actually tweeted about it multiple times over several months.
He said to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “What’s he going to say, don’t get him? And he gets all this credit? It’s a lot of crap.” You can expect the same people who spent months, years even, trying to take credit away from Obama for bin Laden to heap it on Trump. Quite frankly, “it’s a load of crap.”
Trump also posted an obviously-staged photo from the situation room. While the photo of Obama’s situation room looked authentic, with all the participants looking toward the monitor, the photo of Trump’s has everyone looking at the camera as though they’re posed at the table. I’m surprised a product placement wasn’t inserted for Trump Doral. As Raf Sanchez, middle-east correspondent for The Telegraph tweeted, “The Trump situation room photo looks quite a bit more self-conscious than the Obama one.”
Fortunately, a lot of people can see right through Trump. While thinking the world will be praising him, he actually faced a crowd, for what’s probably the last time, that wasn’t a MAGA hate rally. At the World Series Sunday night, Trump got booed and was greeted with chants of “lock him up.”
Boos are appropriate for the boo-hooer.
