It looks like Donald Trump may have finally gone too far with the tweets.
On Monday and Tuesday, Trump racked up an “impressive” list of Twitter achievements including:
- calling the Mayor of a city besieged by terrorists “pathetic“
- insulting his own Department of Justice
- implicitly blaming the judiciary for any future terror attacks on US soil
- jeopardizing America’s largest Mideast military base by essentially admitting to conspiring against Qatar
The Wall Street Journal had seen enough. “Some people with a propensity for self-destructive behavior can’t seem to help themselves, President Trump apparently among them,” a Tuesday Op-ed reads. “Over the weekend and into Monday he indulged in another cycle of Twitter outbursts and pointless personal feuding that may damage his agenda and the powers of the Presidency.”
Sean Spicer found himself defenseless when asked by reporters if Trump had lost confidence in Jeff Sessions. “I have not had a discussion with him about that,” Spicer said, perhaps not realizing how momentous it was for a White House press secretary to refuse to confirm that the Attorney General still has the blessing of the Oval Office.
Even Fox News seemed to reach its breaking point yesterday when Neil Cavuto said this:
Mr. President, it’s not the ‘fake-news media’ that’s your problem. It’s you.
Well on Wednesday, Salon has a pretty hilarious piece out on Trump’s Qatar tweets and regardless of what you think about Salon, I would challenge you to read the following and not at least chuckle…
Trump’s foreign trip made it obvious that he is way in over his head. There were lots of great visuals on the Saudi leg of the trip with everyone sword-dancing and clutching glowing orbs. Conservative media swooned, portraying the trip as a major breakthrough in which Trump singlehandedly ended all bad blood among former rivals and brought the region together in peace and harmony. (Well, except for Iran, which all parties have agreed to hate.) He didn’t give any press conferences but did give some speeches, which were notable for what they didn’t say rather than what they did. In Saudi Arabia he didn’t mention human rights and at NATO headquarters he purposefully refused to endorse Article 5, the mutual defense pact at the heart of the alliance.
In the Middle East, he sounded like a used car salesman trying to move surplus vehicles off the back lot with statements such as this one to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani:
We are friends, we’ve been friends for a long time now, haven’t we? Our relationship is extremely good, we have some very serious discussions right now going on, and one of the things that we will discuss is the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment, because nobody makes it like the United States. And for us, that means jobs, and it also means frankly great security back here, which we want.
Imagine the emir’s surprise when he read these statements from Donald Trump on Tuesday:
Those were the first public statements made by the president of the United States addressing the fact that Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt – as well as the Saudi-backed government in Yemen, the Emirati-backed government in eastern Libya and the Maldives – suspended economic and diplomatic relations with Qatar. That happened on Monday, ostensibly over Qatar’s alleged support for Iran and terrorist organizations.
Always eager to pat himself on the back, Trump took credit for this crisis but seemed not to recall that on his trip he called Qatar a crucial strategic partner – which it is, since it hosts the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command and tens of thousands of American troops are on the ground there. Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. may also going to break with Qatar could point toward an enormous military and strategic upheaval.
As usual, the president didn’t seem to have consulted with anyone before he issued his startling statements. The Pentagon praised Qatar for its “contribution to the security of the region” and for hosting the U.S. military, and had no answer for the question of what in the world Trump was talking about.The ambassador to Qatar took to Twitter to reassure the world that the U.S. was still an ally. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged the parties to sit down and try to work things out.
If Trump were able to keep his attention on the topic longer than a couple of minutes, he might have learned that the disputes among these countries are far more complicated than Qatar’s support for terrorism. (Saudi Arabia is hardly one to talk.) This article in the Washington Post, from a few days before the announcement that these countries were cutting ties with Qatar, explains the underlying conflict in some detail.
What is clear is that while Trump may have little understanding of the issues at stake, the players see a shift from the Obama administration’s policy of working with the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) as a coalition to a focus on just Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, apparently based in large part on Jared Kushner’s personal relationships with those two countries’ leaders. They are taking advantage of the opening Trump has presented to change the balance of power in the region.
The twist on the story is that this crisis was predicated on an alleged statement attributed to Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim on May 23 in which he supposedly praised Hamas and called Iran “a big power in the stabilization of the region.” On Tuesday, CNN reported that U.S. investigators now suspect that was literally a fake news report, planted by Russian hackers on Qatar’s state news agency.
President Trump is the man who said the Israel-Palestine issue is “something that I think is frankly, maybe, not as difficult as people have thought over the years” and that “nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” so we know he tends to see the world in extremely simple terms. It’s too much to expect that he will ever be able to understand the complexity of relationships between nations of the Middle East. But it really isn’t too much to ask that he not make ignorant and unfounded statements on Twitter about such important issues. One of these days it could be fatal.
This is just one more act of many by T that supports the Russians. Is he really that stupid or if he is, then who is pulling the puppet strings? Bannon? So, we are losing or at least insulting every important ally we have.