Donald Trump has been watching Fox News again and the vicious cycle continues to turn out Trump tweetstorms, tagging Fox News as the source of one of his tweets before calling everybody else “fake news”:
"The first 90 days of my presidency has exposed the total failure of the last eight years of foreign policy!" So true. @foxandfriends
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2017
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A great book for your reading enjoyment: "REASONS TO VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS" by Michael J. Knowles.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2017
The Fake Media (not Real Media) has gotten even worse since the election. Every story is badly slanted. We have to hold them to the truth!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2017
With this mention of “total failure,” Trump is clearly referring to what Mike Pence today called the failed policies of the “era of strategic patience.”
Finally, two people in the Trump administration actually on the same page.
It’s the wrong page, of course:
Yes, Donald Trump thinks shooting 59 cruise missiles at an airfield in Syria to put it out of commission for less than a day, and dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal on a remote mountain valley in Afghanistan to kill less than 100 of our enemies, exposes “the total failure of the last eight years of foreign policy.”
Even not accounting for the success of Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” if success is measured in sheer explosive power, President Obama has Donald Trump beat many times over.
The U.S. has peppered plenty of targets over the past eight years with far more ordinance than Donald Trump has dropped in the past week, and with far more spectacular results. Even accounting for MOAB.
And President Obama has far more to show for both his diplomatic and his military efforts, including not only the death of Osama bin Laden but numerous al Qaeda and ISIS leaders.
Under Obama’s leadership and the “strategic patience” Mike Pence called “failed” this morning, ISIS has been nearly destroyed.
It was a coalition of partners that accomplished this task, not Trump’s belligerent rhetoric and reckless use of military might.
You can tell also that Trump was stung by the protests against him this weekend. He has already shown that even taking a detour to avoid them didn’t protect his fragile ego and raging insecurities.
It is a measure of Trump’s hurt feelings that he says a media that no longer unquestioningly dotes on his every word is somehow “worse.”
The “Real Media” still has a long way to go, of course (and Fox the Fake Media will arguably never get there) but the word Trump is looking for is not “worse,” but rather “more accurate.”
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
