Trump is the most powerless president in American history
Trump wallows in a vat of perks as his broken promises pile up
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
10.07.2017•8:00 AM
Let’s begin with the war in Afghanistan — because it’s a war, and American soldiers are dying over there; because according to the Congressional Research Service, it costs the American taxpayer $3.9 million to keep one American soldier over there for one year; because according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University, our presence in Afghanistan has cost us $2 trillion over 16 years. Think of it. Two trillion dollars. That would have provided 38 years of funding for the Department of Education, 36 years of funding for the State Department, and 148 years of funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million underprivileged children, the funding for which Congress just let lapse. By any measure you can think of, we have spent a staggering amount of money over the 16 years we have been there. Which is at least part of the reason Donald J. Trump, as a private citizen and as a candidate for president, repeatedly said he wanted to get us out of Afghanistan.
Back in 2013, Trump went on what we would now call a tweet storm over the war in Afghanistan, perhaps road-testing what would become his policy of putting “America first.” “We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first,” he tweeted. Later, he tweeted: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”
Two years later, as a candidate for president in October of 2015, Trump told CNN’s New Day program: "We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place. We had real brilliant thinkers that didn't know what the hell they were doing. And it's a mess. It's a mess. And at this point, you probably have to (stay) because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave. Just as I said that Iraq was going to collapse after we leave."
Two more years have passed, and Trump is now the president of the United States, and what did he do back in mid-August? Did he announce a new trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that would “rebuild the USA” with projects to repair roads and bridges and put “world class” airports where we now have “third world” airports? No, what he did was announce that he would be sending 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan in a kind of mini-surge, adding to the approximately 8,400 we already have over there. He announced the troop increase in order to accomplish “obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaida, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge,” goals pretty much indistinguishable from those of his predecessors, Presidents Obama and Bush, whose Afghanistan policies he was criticizing in his tweets and statements on the campaign trail last year.
Why did he go back on one of the few things he actually appears to believe in, the futility of spending more blood and treasure overseas in useless wars? Could Trump have handled the August Afghanistan decision differently, you ask? Why, yes he could have. Instead of announcing that he was sinking 4,000 additional troops in the 16-year-old pit of quicksand that is Afghanistan, he could have announced that he wasn’t sending over even one more soldier, and in fact, was beginning a gradual troop pull-out. You want to know why he could do that? Because he’s commander in chief of our armed forces, that’s why. Because he’s the president of the United States. He’s the top dog. He gets to do what he wants to do, and the Army, or the Navy, or the Air Force — every swingin’ you know what in the whole damn Pentagon — has to do what he says.
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https://www.salon.com/2017/10/07/the-most-powerless-president-in-american-history/
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