Taunts make us less safe
A month before launching his presidential campaign, Donald Trump told Fox News that he had a secret plan for defeating the Islamic State, but that he couldn’t tell anyone what it was.
“I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing,” Trump said in May of 2015. “Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to tell at some point, but there is a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory,” he added.
Following a terrorist attack in London over the weekend that killed seven people, Trump’s secret plan for defeating ISIS evidently still remains secret. To date, the world knows more about what the U.S. president thinks of Carmen Electra’s boob job (”They look like 2 light bulbs coming out of a body”) than it knows about his long-promised plan to eradicate terrorism.
That’s because despite his campaign-era windbaggery, he never really had an actual plan to defeat ISIS. Upon taking office, he boldly asked his generals — the ones who he claimed knew less about fighting ISIS than he did — to come up with a plan posthaste.
This makes Trump’s trash-talk of London’s mayor in the hours following last weekend’s terror attack all the more galling. After tweeting a Drudge Report alert about the attack, Trump offered his blessings to London. But then the U.S. president hammered London Mayor Sadiq Khan, taking Khan’s statement that there was “no reason to be alarmed” out of context to make it appear as if Khan was soft on terrorism.
When Khan corrected Trump’s misquotation, Trump once again took to Twitter to call Khan’s defense a “pathetic excuse.” Trump has previously tangled with Khan over the president’s proposed travel ban from several predominantly Muslim countries. In turn, Khan has since asked the British government to cancel a scheduled state visit by Trump.
Setting aside the distaste of shredding a grieving mayor while he’s trying to make sense of another terror attack (and granted, this is like setting aside Mount McKinley), Trump’s embarrassing bellicosity could do America a great deal of damage.
In the event the United States is attacked during Trump’s presidential term — not an unreasonable possibility — how will other foreign governments respond, knowing that if the shoe were on the other foot, Trump would be mocking them? Now, more than ever, diplomacy will be incumbent on our allies taking the high road. Where America had been a guiding moral force in the world, now other nations will have to cooperate with us in spite of our leader, not because of him.
Suppose U.S. intelligence officers get word of a terrorist plot on American soil; Trump already has made it more difficult for his own intelligence bureaus to collect information, having compared them to the Nazi Gestapo soon after taking office.
But what foreign governments are going to share their intelligence with him now that he’s already leaked classified secrets in person to the Russians? This is a president who trashes his allies
while they are under attack and rewards his adversaries by blurting out unsolicited state secrets. What nation is going to risk its own safety to share information with someone so clearly unstable?
There are few things worse than being lectured to by an ignoramus, but that will not stop Trump from berating other free nations who suffer attacks by Islamic extremists. Let us all hope such a fate doesn’t befall America. But Trump’s attempts to make the term “foreign intelligence” an oxymoron is making such a disaster more likely, not less.