Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks
President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump applaud as they stand next to ROTC members from Clemson University and Louisiana State University before the national anthem at the College Football Playoff National Championship Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
Believe it or not, the most dangerous day of Donald Trump’s presidency wasn’t that day last week when he was stumbling toward World War III by threatening to “HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” 52 high-level Iranian targets, including cultural treasures (which would have been an international war crime), if Iran dared strike back at any American assets in response to Trump’s assassination of Iran’s top military commander.
No, with Trump, the most dangerous day of his presidency is always tomorrow. That’s because absolutely no one, including Trump himself, has any idea what an irrational, unpredictable, impulsively erratic U.S. president might do when he wakes up tomorrow. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise—including every Republican intelligent enough to recognize what a frighteningly uncontrollable man they’ve put in command of the nation’s nuclear arsenal—is delusional. Whatever Trump does will be based on his own overheated brain chemistry at any given moment and not on any thoughtful collective wisdom of well-informed diplomatic and military experts who simply do not exist in the White House of a reckless, bullying president whose go-to move when millions of lives hang in the balance is to spew inflammatory, hateful rhetoric.
For the moment, the immediate threat to our lives seems to have eased temporarily, but only because the actions of Iran, a nation we consider our enemy, were far more responsible on the world stage than those of our own president. Instead of continuing escalating, tit-for-tat military strikes with the U.S., Iran chose the symbolic retaliation of firing missiles at a U.S. military base in Iraq after advance warning allowed troops to take cover in bunkers.
Absurd Statement
That didn’t prevent Trump from reading an absurd statement from the White House falsely claiming credit for ending the threat of widespread war in the Middle East he began by murdering Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike on the same day as a failed U.S. assassination attempt on another Iranian general in Yemen. Surely I wasn’t the only one to notice Trump appeared to be heavily drugged as he read the statement from a teleprompter in a robotic monotone.
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Since then, according to U.S. senators and representatives from both parties, administration officials have held closed-door briefings in which they’ve failed to provide any evidence to support claims by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Iran was planning an “imminent” attack on four embassies—or any specific attack at all—justifying the assassination of its military leaders. Trump’s statement also included the total fabrication that former President Barack Obama’s 2016 multi-national agreement halting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons provided the funds Iran used for the missiles it fired at the U.S. military base in Iraq.
In fact, the consequences of Trump’s attacks against Iran’s military were considerably more dangerous, because Trump had effectively freed Iran to resume developing nuclear weapons by withdrawing from the agreement in 2018. Trump’s now begging the other nations that signed the agreement—Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany—to join him in negotiating a new agreement with Iran. Why would Iran negotiate any agreement with Trump after he’s trashed the one negotiated with the U.S. that Iran was abiding by?
Expecting warfare to follow rules of morality may seem like an oxymoron, but under Trump, the U.S. seems to have adopted a new level of savagery we’ve always condemned when ISIS and the Taliban resort to assassinating the leaders of sovereign nations and threatening civilization’s cultural and artistic treasures.
Trump Makes Us Less Safe
Beyond morality, there are practical reasons for the U.S. to act decently in the world. In a new ABC News/Ipsos national poll, 56% of all Americans, including 57% of political independents, disapproved of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict for a very good reason: 52% of all Americans said they felt they were less safe as a result. Only 43% of Americans approved of Trump’s actions, and only 25% claimed they felt safer.
Trump has encouraged his supporters to attack any American who criticizes his murder and attempted murder of Iranian military leaders as traitors to their country who “mourn the death of terrorists” instead of mourning with Gold Star families who lose loved ones to terrorism. Trump should be ashamed to promote such a twisted, un-American accusation since he’s the only U.S. politician who has ever been vile enough to publicly attack a Muslim American Gold Star family.
Every time Trump justifies his latest reckless act of inhumanity with ALL CAPS mad ravings on Twitter, it should be another reminder to all Americans how urgent it is to replace him with a competent, decent human being. The sooner that happens, the sooner every American can stop worrying that the nation could be plunged into another endless war tomorrow based on an angry whim and explained away by a pack of lies.
