Apr 16, 2018 4 min read

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!”

A President Trump tweet, 3:57 AM, April 11, 2018

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There are times when President Trump seems to think he’s John Wayne in the movie True Grit.

He’s the ultimate tough guy.

A man who knows no fear.

But there’s one big difference between John Wayne playing Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, and our current tough-guy-in-chief.

Wayne shot the bad guy, Trump shoots off his mouth.

Back in 2013, when President Obama was faced with the possibility of taking action in Syria, Mr. Trump sent out a fusillade of tweets.

“AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA – IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!” he tweeted in ALL CAPS on September 5th, 2013.

To Trump, Obama would be a “foolish leader,” if he attacked Syria.

Now that Trump sits in the Oval Office, he’s forgotten he wrote that tweet. Or, since he’s the one brandishing his missiles, it’s no longer a “foolish” thing to do.

If you flash forward to when Trump was a presidential candidate, he repeatedly claimed that he’d never do what he did last week by “broadcasting” his plans of attack.

“I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is. I’m not going to call you up and say we have a great plan,” he tweeted on Sept. 7, 2016.

He ended that tweet by employing his go-to sneer when he wanted everybody to know he was the right man for the job – “This is what Obama does.”

You’d have to wonder why Trump would send out such a bellicose, early-morning message – bragging about “nice and new and smart” missiles.

You might wonder, but I don’t.

He’d had a rather rough day and a half before he sent out that message.

The FBI conducted a raid on the office, home and hotel room of his trusted attorney – Michael Cohen.

Trump appeared that day fuming about the raid, during what was supposed to have been a high-level meeting with members of his joint chiefs of staff.

First, he didn’t call the raid a raid.

“So, I just heard they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys,” he said with his arms folded, and his face hardly containing his fury.

For the record, nobody “broke into the office” of his attorney.

It had been a raid that could not have been approved if it hadn’t been the result of some very strict legal guidelines.

Hyperbole and hypocrisy are always handy for Trump to lean on, when he feels pressure coming from anywhere.

Here’s more hyperbole.

“This is the most biased group of people,” he said regarding those folks who sanctioned the raid on his attorney.

That’s not the case.

It was special counsel Robert Mueller, a Republican and Trump’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, also a Republican, who approved the raid.

Whenever Trump feels heat, he pulls the word “disgrace” out and flashes it to the media.

While in mid-tirade, he used the word “disgrace” nine times.

“And it’s a disgrace, it’s frankly a real disgrace,” he said about the raid.

He didn’t, though resort to some attack on Obama. He went directly to his go-to number two – Hillary Clinton.

For some reason, Trump believes that when his attorney was handed a search warrant, Clinton should have been handed one too.

“They’re not looking into the other side. They’re not looking at Hillary Clinton; the horrible things she did,” he said.

Let’s face it. He knows he’s in the hot seat, so the words “Hillary Clinton,” just fly out of his mouth.

Meanwhile, the Russians have responded to Trump’s braggadocio about Russia getting ready for the “nice and new and smart” missiles he’s going to send to Syria.

The official word from Russia is, “We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy.”

OUCH!

Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter and anchor for Entertainment Tonight and 20-year TV news veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.