Trump’s way with words: Ouch!
Donald Trump says such weird, sometimes hurtful, things, that he makes it easy to pile on. At his invitation, practically speaking, let’s take two examples from just the past week or so.
Example one: the death of Robert Mueller.
A week ago Friday, Mueller died. He was 81. The director of the FBI under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Mueller was a Marine Corps veteran. He fought in Vietnam, where he was wounded, and received both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for heroism.
As a Justice Department lawyer in 1991-1992, he led the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on drug charges. Earlier, he oversaw the government’s investigation into the terrorist assault on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 243 lives were lost.
In May 2017, Mueller, a lifelong Republican, was appointed special counselor by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His assignment from Trump’s own Justice Department: examine possible links between the Russian government and individuals who had worked on the Trump presidential campaign.
Mueller concluded that the regime of Vladimir Putin worked to secure Trump’s win, but did not actively collaborate with the Trump campaign. For its part, the Trump team welcomed the Kremlin’s assistance without actually soliciting it.
Despite the findings, which the president took as exoneration, Donald Trump hated the upright, by-the-book Mueller. Following the announcement of Mueller’s death, the president on social media, wrote with malice, “Good. I am glad he’s dead.”
Having disgraced himself following the earlier deaths of John McCain and Rob Reiner, among others, maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. But the president surprises all the time. He is a surprise machine. The surprise factor is a political strength of his: One surprise follows another in such rapid succession that it’s hard to remain focused on any one surprise – or outrage – for very long.
As David Frum observed: Robert Mueller was “the least aggressive antagonist Trump has ever faced.”
Still, Trump vented his ill-will toward Mueller to the end, and beyond. Two rationales present themselves. The best that can be said is that Trump, try as he might, was unable to stifle his true feelings. The worst is that the president is an individual of monumental rages, whose animosities spill and splatter in any and all directions, without his even thinking about it.
Example two: the Japanese prime minister and Pearl Harbor.
The prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, recently visited President Trump in the Oval Office. As is customary, reporters shouted questions at the president. One reporter wanted Trump to elaborate on the start of the war against Iran, and the administration’s failure to alert U.S. allies in advance of the attack.
“We didn’t tell anyone about it because we wanted a surprise,” President Trump answered. After a brief pause, the president turned to Prime Minister Takaichi, who was seated next to him.
“Who knows better about surprises than Japan, ok?” Donald Trump said. “Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, ok? Right?”
It’s not clear that the president actually expected an answer. In any event, Takaichi didn’t respond. Instead, she looked on, impassively, to the suggestion she was the head of a country still capable of treachery on a world-shaking scale.
Of course, the prime minister is a veteran politician, presumably tough-minded and resilient. And of course, she has nothing to explain away. Born in 1961, 20 years after the sneak attack by the Japanese, Takaichi during her lifetime has known nothing but peace between her country and the U.S.
The Japanese assault on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii is as foreign to her as it is Trump, who was born in 1946.
Japan has been in our camp practically from the time it surrendered in late summer 1945. The president, not a student of history, was decades late in delivering his barb.
In attaching Takaichi to Pearl Harbor, however, Trump revealed a telling point about the U.S. conflict with Iran: Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 in the midst of peace talks between the two sides. The U.S. attack on Iran occurred 48 hours after an Oman-sponsored meeting in which the U.S. and Iran were negotiating a nuclear weapons accord.
Immaterial as those talks are now, both the Oman foreign secretary and a U.K. security expert, Jonathan Powell, observing the discussions, thought enough progress was being made to warrant guarded optimism.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. The author of JFK Rising and Troubled Times, he can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.