Tag Archives: Donald Trump

military news

Trump throws down on Pakistan

2 Comments

There’s quite a bit to parse about Donald Trump speech tonight about a change of strategy in our nation’s ongoing war in Afghanistan and its military policies regarding South Asia.

Let’s look briefly at Pakistan

The president has declared that Pakistan has to step up and become a significant U.S. ally in the fight against the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

I actually agree with the president’s view on Pakistan, a nation I never have trusted fully to be a valuable partner in that struggle. You’ll recall that in May 2011 our SEAL and CIA commandos killed Osama bin Laden in a compound where he lived for years inside of Pakistan. No one has yet produced evidence that the Pakistanis were totally ignorant of bin Laden’s presence inside their country.

So, yes, the Pakistanis have to demonstrate their commitment to fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan.

Then the president reached across Pakistan and tapped its arch-rival India to play a larger role in this effort. Can there be a more stinging slap in the Pakistanis’ face than that?

The strategy change as delivered tonight lacks detail. Trump’s decision to wage war until circumstances dictate a possible end creates the potential for an open-ended conflict. Are we ready for that?

He also laid down a marker at the feet of the Afghan government. Trump wants to see “real results” in an effort to end corruption. He wants to see the Afghans demonstrate a military capability that prevents the Taliban from return to power.

The president talked for quite a long time before running for office that the Afghan War was a foolish contest. Then he took his seat behind the Oval Office desk, he said tonight, and saw things differently. I’m glad he recognized how perspectives change when you obtain power.

Something is gnawing at my gut that we’ve just heard the president of the United States commit this country to continuing fighting a war that still seems to lack a strategy for winning.

U.S. forces won far more battles in Vietnam than they lost. Conventional wisdom held that we should have actually won that war. We didn’t. The Vietnamese outlasted us. We left and the enemy we “defeated” on the battlefield took control of the government we sought to protect and preserve.

Is there a similar outcome awaiting us in Afghanistan?

national news

GOP silence is getting louder

You can understand that Democrats are angry with Donald J. Trump.

The president won an election he was supposed to lose to the Democratic Party nominee. Congressional Democrats haven’t gotten over it … yet!

Republicans, though, are demonstrating their angst and anger at Trump differently than their colleagues on the other side of the chasm.

They are staying quiet. More or less. A few congressional Republicans are speaking against the president, namely over his stated reaction to the Charlottesville mayhem. However, except for a few on the far right wing of the party, one is hearing damn little comment that even remotely resembles support for the president’s equating of Nazis and Klansmen to those who protested their march in Charlottesville.

If I were Donald Trump — and I am so glad to be far away from this guy — I would be worried to the max about the GOP silence. Trump has demonstrated already he doesn’t give a damn about Democrats; nor do Democrats, to be fair, give a damn about him. Now, though, he is providing evidence that he doesn’t care about Republicans, either; the GOP silence suggests to me the feeling is increasingly mutual.

Trump has gone after the Senate majority leader; he’s attacked GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona; he lashes out at Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; he even attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, and a good friend of many in the Senate — on both sides of the aisle.

GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine now says she isn’t even sure Trump will be the party’s presidential nominee in 2020.

The Republican Party’s relative silence may deliver more damage to the president than the howling we’re getting from the other side.

national news

Now, a good word for Teleprompters

I stand before you in defense of Teleprompters.

They are a commonly used device. Politicians use them all the time. They’ve been in use for decades. Speechwriters prepare the text that pols deliver and put them on these devices. Then the pol reads the remarks from a screen at eye level, which is meant to give the audience the illusion of extemporaneous speech.

It ain’t.

Donald J. Trump is going to read a speech tonight. He’ll talk about his strategy in Afghanistan and perhaps reveal how he intends to fight the 16-year-long Afghan War. I’ve heard the president’s critics say all day about how he’s going to read a speech written by someone else. These critics intend to diminish the words the president will say.

C’mon, folks.

We heard much of the same sort of criticism leveled at Barack Obama when he was president. His critics would demean his statements that he would read from a Teleprompter. “He gives a good speech,” they say, “but he doesn’t mean it. He’s speaking someone else’s words.”

Every single president dating back to, oh, Dwight Eisenhower have read speeches from Teleprompters; Ike was the first president to use the device to deliver a State of the Union speech. Some are more graceful using the device than others. Donald Trump clearly needs practice using the Teleprompter. When you watch him stand in front of the Teleprompter, you end up anticipating when he’s going to launch into one of those nonsensical, unscripted riffs.

His reading of the text often sounds painful; some folks have described his Teleprompter performances as sounding as if he is being held hostage.

Have you ever watched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Of course you have. Dr. King started reading the prepared text; I believe he had a Teleprompter. His prepared remarks were fine. Then he veered into the ad-lib portion that has become legendary. “I have a dream,” he would repeat. He tossed out the prepared remarks and finished with “Thank God Almighty, I am free at last!”

So, let’s stop obsessing over whether the president uses a Teleprompter. Of course he does! As he should.

International news, military news

Will the president recognize his Afghan reversal?

Donald John Trump is preparing to speak to the nation tonight about Afghanistan. The word that’s being reported is that the president is planning to announce the addition of several thousand more troops to the conflict that’s been raging for the past 16 years.

The president is getting high marks for recognizing the difference between campaigning and governing. Indeed, President Barack Obama campaigned for office pledging to close the terrorist internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the camp is still open.

Trump has been a huuuuge critic of the Afghan War. He tweeted repeatedly prior to and during his presidential campaign that the war is a lost cause, that we shouldn’t shed any more American blood in Afghanistan.

Now he’s the commander in chief. He’s expected now to say something quite different from what he said while campaigning for the job.

Will the president take a moment tonight to acknowledge that maybe — just maybe — he might have been incorrect in his prior world view? Might he concede finally that he didn’t see the picture as completely as he does now?

That’s what grownups do. They atone for previous statements.

What’s more, my hope — if not my expectation — is that the president will accept responsibility for any potential setbacks that occur once the troops are deployed to Afghanistan. Will he, as commander in chief, realize that he is ultimately responsible for any result stemming from the decisions he makes — be they good or bad?

The record to this point doesn’t portend much maturity coming from the president.

I hope I am wrong.

national news

How many more ‘worst weeks’ can POTUS endure?

It’s been said over the past couple of days that Donald J. Trump’s list of “worst weeks of his presidency” has become too numerous to count. Suffice to say that the week just past likely qualifies as his last “worst week.”

They rioted in Charlottesville, Va., over a Confederate statue. A young woman — someone who was there to protest the neo-Nazi/Klan/white supremacists who objected to the removal of the statue — was run over in what has been called an act of “domestic terrorism.” The president first blamed “many sides” for the violence; then he blamed the KKK and neo-Nazis for it; then he blamed “both sides” and accused the “alt-left” of provoking an angry response from the Nazis/KKK.

It got real crappy for the president.

A new week is about to convene for the commander in chief and he’s got a chance — or so it appears — to do something right. He’s going to speak to the nation at 8 p.m. (CDT) Monday to announce a new “strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia.”

We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for 16 years, the longest stretch of open warfare in the nation’s history. The 9/11 terrorists declared war on the United States and President Bush responded quickly. The war continued through his two terms and through two terms of Barack Obama’s presidency.

What is the current president going to tell us? Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis would reveal it. He chose wisely to leave it to the president to make his own announcement.

What should Trump do? My sincere hope was that we could end the contest in Afghanistan. That won’t happen. The war we’ve fought there hasn’t produced the ironclad strength in the government we installed when we threw the Taliban out of power in 2001.

The nation will wait to hear from the president about how he intends to continue prosecuting this war. That’s his call.

I’ll just ask one favor: Please, Mr. President, stick to the issue at hand and spare us yet another boasting of how smart you are, how rich you are, how many “really smart people” surround you, and how you won the presidency against all odds.

We’ve got young Americans in harm’s way, Mr. President, and now is the time to present yourself as a commander in chief who knows what the hell he’s doing.

national news

Alt-right = white supremacists

This well might be the final time I’ll refer to the term “alt-right” in a manner other than to quote someone else’s statement about it.

You may count me, therefore, as one who wants to cease euphemizing what I believe the term really means: white supremacists, racist, bigots.

It has emerged in recent years as a term to define those on the far-right fringe of the political/ideological spectrum. As the events in Charlottesville, Va. — not to mention other communities that have been victimized by spasms of race-related violence — have shown us, the term “alt-right” has focused on a specific brand of political protest.

It has come to represent the views of those who support racist, bigoted ideologies. The term “far right” has taken on an ugly, evil identity. Perhaps it’s because what we used to know as the “conservative movement” has itself moved far past the midway point. To be called a conservative these days seems to mean something different than it did during the day of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Donald J. Trump used the term “alt-right” to turn on what he called the “alt-left,” the counter protesters who clashed in Charlottesville with the neo-Nazis and KKK members who gathered to protest the taking down of that statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Here again, we saw the president seek to place the hate groups on equal footing with those who protested against them.

As for the term “alt-right,” consider me to be among those who no longer prefers to see it used other than to make sure we know what it represents.

It represents hatred and bigotry.

There. I’m done with that word.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2016/11/alt-right-becomes-euphemism-for-something-ugly/

national news

Bannon’s gone, but is he … really?

Stephen K. Bannon’s departure from the West Wing of the White House has been hailed as a victory for sanity and reason.

But is he gone? Really gone? Will the alt-right guru disappear into the mist, or into the swamp? Don’t hold your breath, dear reader.

Bannon served as “senior strategist” for Donald Trump. He is an avid “anti-globalist.” He takes pride in steering the president toward his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord and for terminating the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Bannon also has been waging a feud with the reasonable elements of the Trump administration. He and national security adviser H.R. McMaster didn’t get along. It then fell to White House chief of staff John Kelly — like McMaster, a general-grade military man — to engineer Bannon’s departure.

So, he’s no longer checking in at the White House.

Bannon has returned his former post, as editor of Breitbart News, the far-right media organ. You now are allowed to bet the farm that Bannon is going to use his new/old job to undermine McMaster some more, only from outside the White House grounds. Bannon said in an interview after his departure that the presidency for which he fought is now “over,” meaning that in Bannon’s view the president has pivoted toward the “globalist” wing within his inner circle.

Bannon is having none of it, vowing to “fight for” Donald Trump, suggesting he’s going to use Breitbart to push an agenda at odds with the likes of Gens. Kelly and McMaster as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis.

I believe the president needs to keep cleaning house. He needs to show other alt-right devotees — such as speechwriter Stephen Miller and supposed “terrorism expert” Sebastian Gorka — the way out the door.

As for Bannon, suffice to say this guy looks ready to exact some revenge against those who got him tossed.

Do you think this means the end of chaos in the White House? Umm, I’m thinking we’ve got a lot more of it in store.

national news

GOP senators lose patience with RINO in chief

Donald John (RINO in chief) Trump’s lack of any association with the Republican political machine may be starting to take its toll on the man’s presidency.

Actual Republican senators are standing up to the man who bills himself as a member of the GOP, but who in reality is a Republican In Name Only.

GOP U.S. senators are now tweeting, writing essays and saying things out loud that suggest that the president’s “agenda,” whatever the hell it is, appears to be teetering on the brink of oblivion.

The president keeps attacking his “fellow Republicans.” He called Sen. Jeff Flake, author of a new book that tears into Trump, a “toxic” lawmaker; moreover, Trump has hailed the GOP primary challenger who has emerged to take on Flake.

The president’s attack on the Arizonan has prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stand squarely behind Flake.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said publicly at a Rotary meeting in Chattanooga that he wonders if Trump is “competent” to continue as president.

Senate GOP gangs up on Trump

Then we have the usual cast of Trump critics within the GOP — Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — continuing to oppose him on policy matters as well as chastising him for his hideous conduct in the wake of the Charlottesville riot.

This is what happens when you get a president with no political history, no public service record on which to draw, no demonstrable commitment to understanding how government works.

It’s as if — as some have suggested — that we have formed a third major political party: We have Democrats, Republicans and the Trump Party, which feeds off the cult of personality developed by the “party” leader, Donald John Trump Sr.

If the president is going to insist that he’s a real, actual Republican, then I am among those who will wait with bated breath for the Goldwater Moment to arrive. As the late Sen. Barry Goldwater was able in 1974 to deliver the sobering news to President Nixon that the president had no support in the Senate and that impeachment would surely result in his removal from office, is there someone to deliver the same kind of news to the current president?

Donald Trump needs to shape up, get rid of the white supremacists/alt-right clowns remaining in his administration and start acting like the Leader of the Free World.

If he doesn’t, his presidency is going nowhere but straight into the trash heap … which wouldn’t be a bad outcome. I fear the collateral damage this RINO in chief is going to inflict along the way.

national news

Ex-Trump flack made the case against armchair diagnoses

Katrina Pierson? Where are you?

The former flack for the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign has been hiding somewhere since his election.  I wrote about her a year ago after she delivered an armchair medical diagnosis on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Here’s what I wrote:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2016/08/she-plays-a-doctor-on-tv-news-shows/

Pierson isn’t a medical doctor. She is — or was — a TEA Party activist and political communications consultant who lives in the Dallas area.

Why bring this individual up again?

She demonstrated the danger of trying to psychoanalyze her former boss’s performance as president from a distance. The president is behaving badly at almost every turn these days. His idiotic tweets seemingly reveal a distasteful juvenile quality in the man’s personality, not to mention an absolute ignorance of the office he inherited when he won the Electoral College vote this past November.

The long-distance diagnoses are starting to creep into the national discussion of Trump’s performance as president. Is he unstable? Is he sufficiently “competent” to do the job? Is there something medically wrong with a man who simply cannot change his method of operation?

Let’s not go there.

Pierson, wherever she is, should have taught us all a lesson — bigly! It is that it is inherently dangerous to pretend to be something or someone we are not.

I’m planning to just watch the president flail and flounder his way, albeit with just a touch of glee. It would serve us all well to avoid falling into the trap that ensnared Katrina Pierson when she sought to talk about something about which she knows not a damn thing.

national news

Trump seeks to keep defying laws of political gravity

Color me baffled. Or mortified. Or, oh, maybe even bamboozled.

Donald John Trump’s latest outrage — where he equated Nazis and Klansmen with those who oppose them — would seem to the final “last straw” that sends his cadre of supporters scurrying elsewhere.

Hah! Hardly, according to a fascinating New York Times article profiling the Republican Party “base” that continues to hang with the president of the United States.

Here is the article.

Trump’s response to the Charlottesville mayhem has fallen along largely partisan lines, according to the Times. Most Republicans support the GOP president; only 10 percent of Democrats do.

Yes, there are signs that Trump’s GOP base is showing stress fractures, that it might be beginning to slip away. There remains, though, this hard-core base of supporters who stand with him. Why? He continues to stick it in the establishment’s eye. He talks plainly and with politically correct pretense, they say.

According to the Times: “It’s an indication of what now seems an almost immutable law of the Trump presidency. There are signs that Mr. Trump’s support among Republican leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increasingly tribal America, with people on the left and the right getting information from different sources and seeing the same facts in different ways, it reflects the way Mr. Trump has become in many ways both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.”

I’ll concede yet again that I’m a member of the “tribe” that has opposed Trump from the very beginning. He presents not a single redeeming quality to public life. He’s immoral and amoral at the same time. He has no ideology. His life is crammed full of examples of how his No. 1 objective has been geared toward personal enrichment.

Thus, when he denigrated Sen. John McCain’s military service, disparaged a Gold Star family, mocked a reporter’s physical disability and boasted about grabbing women by their private parts, this individual only reinforced every single negative impression I had of him. Accordingly, it has amazed me in the extreme that his political base has held together as firmly as it has … to date.

Again, from the Times: “Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could ‘walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.’ That is something that the ‘nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,’ could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table.

“’The guys who wouldn’t like me wouldn’t like Trump,’ he said. ‘The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.'”

The president is counting on those folks to see him through this latest “last straw.” I’ll concede this point: When Trump said during the campaign that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” and retain his political core of support, he proved to be more correct than most of us ever imagined.