The Commander-in-Tweet Isn't Just Disrespectful, He's Dangerous

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Trump’s defenders say that his tweets are aimed at his base. Too bad the rest of the world reads them, too.

by Ward Carroll
May 26, 2020

Three presidential administrations have had ownership of America’s longest war. President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after the Taliban refused to oust al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, in a manner that suited him. He then shifted the Pentagon’s focus two-and-a-half years later by ordering the invasion of Iraq, which allowed the Taliban to reverse the gains made by coalition forces during the first phase of the war. President Obama—who’d campaigned on a plank that there was a “bad” war and a “good” war—pulled U.S. forces out of Iraq while surging the number in Afghanistan. But by the end of his time in office, along with ordering the SEAL mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, he’d lowered the troop level from a high-water mark of 140,000 to 9,000, using the claim that the hard-won reduction in Taliban-led violence against the central government would now allow Afghan forces to oversee to Afghanistan’s security.

Then, in spite of the fact that during one of the Republican debates his fellow candidate Jeb Bush told him he couldn’t insult his way to the presidency, Donald J. Trump did just that. Candidate Trump’s national defense message from the stump had basically been that “we don’t know how to win anymore” and he knew more about the threat than the generals did. Once in office, his first acts as commander-in-chief were to take credit for a Pentagon multi-year airplane contract that had been finalized during the Obama administration and to publicly blame military leaders for an ill-fated special operations raid in Yemen.

The three-and-a-half years that followed have demonstrated that President Trump is out of his depth when trying to lead the U.S. military. Instead of productively addressing NATO’s funding inequities, he tried to bully America’s treaty partners, most visibly at a summit in Brussels where the schoolyard dynamic was on full display, cliques and all. This unprecedented tension with our allies was against a backdrop of equally unprecedented statements where the president of the United States told the world that he’d fallen in love with North Korea’s brutal dictator and that he believed the Russian president’s claim that that country had nothing to do with American election interference in spite of the findings of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.

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Trump’s defenders say that his tweets are aimed at his base, but, to our collective national embarrassment, the rest of the world reads them too. And it doesn’t overstate the threat to worry aloud that his intellectual sloth and lack of precision in the words he chooses while addressing defense matters emboldens our enemies, both nation-state and independent actors. At first, they thought he was ballsy and crazy enough to act on his not-so-veiled threats about how big his button is and how he could end wars very quickly (read “nuclear option”) if he wanted to. But now they see that he’s just a functional illiterate with a short attention span.

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https://thebulwark.com/the-commander-in-tweet-isnt-just-disrespectful-hes-dangerous

[Atticus]

1. Hiz bass cain't reed! nt