Donald Trump appeared on Fox News‘ “Fox & Friends” this morning to be interviewed by Ainsley Earhardt. Earhardt asked Trump about Mike Pence’s trip to Korea and his warning that the U.S. is running out of patience.
“Have you ruled out a military strike?” she asked.
“I don’t wanna telegraph what I’m doing or what I’m thinking. I’m not like other administrations where they say ‘we’re going to do this in four weeks’ and it doesn’t work that way. We’ll see what happens.”
.@POTUS on tensions between U.S. and North Korea pic.twitter.com/k10z2tUxbH
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— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 18, 2017
“I hope things work out well. I hope there’s going to be peace but you know they’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time. You read Clinton’s book he says we made such a great peace deal and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years with President Obama, everybody has been outplayed. They’ve all been outplayed by this gentlemen. And we’ll see what happens but I just don’t telegraph my moves.”
Um, no…they haven’t been outplayed by “this gentleman.”
Trump claimed, and Earhardt, of course, lets the lie pass, that the “gentleman” Clinton dealt with is the same gentleman Obama dealt with, and by extension, Trump. It is not. It’s a different guy. Clinton dealt with Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, as did Obama for the first two years of his presidency. Trump is dealing with Kim Jong-Un, who was only 16 when Clinton’s term ended.
But don’t let facts get in the way of a good story, a story that will show that it was Donald Trump at last who took the measure of the dreaded gentleman of North Korea.
Trump has a strange way of doing it. He says he doesn’t want to telegraph his moves, but there was this tweet last week which sent a rather strong and pointed message:
North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2017
To which former Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency Jeremy Bash says, “That to me signals pre-emptive military action.â€
Yeah. Real subtle.
And then there is the U.S. Navy’s Carl Vinson Strike Group sailing to the Korean peninsula, which has intent written all over it.
With both Russia and China keeping an eye on the American ships we can conclude that cheap talk aside, Trump isn’t outplaying anyone with his ham-fisted approach to foreign affairs.
“What happens if North Korea launches another missile?” asked Earhardt finally.
Trump’s answer: “We’ll find out.”
Donald Trump is once again on the hunt for distractions and cheap victories to elevate himself. After Syria and Afghanistan, he has picked North Korea for his next demonstration.
And now, safe from flying bullets, serial draft-dodger Donald Trump, at last, embraces the trumpet calls from which he fled five times.
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.
