Pointless exclamation
Donald Trump exclaims merely by talking or tweeting, even by being. His use of exclamation points therefore is superfluous.
It’s also silly, which, regarding Trump, is redundant.
Exclamation points are avoided by serious persons and adults. A statement either exclaims or doesn’t.
Affixing an exclamation point is akin to putting “ha” or “LOL” after a sentence. If the reader didn’t laugh in real time, there’s no point in telling him to laugh after the fact.
——————— On Wednesday, between exclamation points, Trump declared the Trump Doctrine in words that he surely wrote himself before ordering his pitiable press office to change nary a letter nor mark.
He began “America First! The world is a very dangerous place!”
Then, on the issue of our intelligence community’s determining that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia knew of the plot to murder and dismember Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, our excuse for a president gathered his depth and eloquence and wrote, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
Stuff happens, exclaimed the president.
Trump’s point, which exclaims itself, is that it does not matter whether the crown prince was engaged in a brutal murderous plot against a dissident journalist. It was that Saudi Arabia is our big-money partner and oil provider and can help as a continued ally in our dealings with Iran, our pursuit of solutions in Yemen and our alliance with Israel. It was that America’s transactional interest, both economic and strategic, must take precedence over any wussy hand-wringing about some distant ally’s killing and dismembering one little ol’ guy.
Trump’s position is not wholly radical among the prevailing adages or tenets of American foreign policy.
One of those adages is that, in this complex world, we have interests, not friends.
That is to say we needn’t love or approve of another nation to maintain a valuable diplomatic partnership with it.
For example, our nation can deeply deplore Saudi Arabia’s cultural diminishment of women, and seek to prod it to moderate and modernize, while maintaining a mutual-interest partnership with the Saudis that enhances our pocketbooks as well as provides leverage against the looming nuclearization of Iran.
But another adage—a principle more than an adage—is that we seek to shine unto the world as a beacon of freedom and human rights. That would dictate that, in pursuit of a better and civilized world, there are times when a compartmentalized mutuality of interest must be subjugated to moral outrage and condemnation.
If it becomes apparent that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia knew that a journalist who writes for one of our newspapers was to be murdered for his dissidence, and then dismembered, then that’s something else entirely.
It becomes no longer enough to seek to prod the Saudis within our mutual-interest alliance to think about maybe not murdering and dismembering quite so much, or even once.
It becomes necessary in such an instance to condemn an act publicly and impose a price, some sanction, even it if hurts us.
The cause of a moral world that condemns brutal murder must prevail over any temporally beneficial transaction.
Perhaps this form will seem entirely too chatty. But I’m thinking that something more formally along the following line, from our president to their accomplice to murder, would be more appropriate than Trump’s juvenile series of exclamations around a theme that dismemberment happens among friends.
It would go something like this: “Hey, prince, you need airplanes and we make the best ones and we have a good deal already negotiated, and I hope we can go forward with it. And Iran is a rogue menace to your region and we are anxious and willing to stay your partner in dealing with those rascals. But you, sir, are now known to us as an accomplice to the brutal murder of a critical columnist. The United States of America, which knows more than you about critical columnists, can never stand idly by or remain silent as if to condone such an atrocity. We stand for a civilized and just and good world, one of freedom and human rights and human decency, and we condemn with outrage what we know your country did. We will be saying so in a public statement to the world that you will be reading shortly. And there’s nothing really to be said beyond that other, we hope, than that you are deeply penitent and committed to reforming yourself to become a partner in a civilized world.”
The tragedy of this American president, indeed the disgrace, is that Trump has revealed himself time and again as the unchangeable old-age version of what he’s always been—a deal-maker, a purely transactional being, a person who’ll say anything to proceed self-interestedly through the moment and in whom a guiding moral principle is not readily evident. Trump exclaims: America First! It should be that America, first, is good. Period.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.