Flip-f lops and fillips
One wonders what President Donald Trump’s hard-core supporters who voted him into office must be making of their leader’s flip flops, and the dramatic events of the past few days.
They elected Trump because he said he was a nationalist, because he was going to put America first, create more jobs, and make America great again.
He said China was the grand champion of currency manipulation, but now he says that they are not currency manipulators.
He berated the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, for keeping interest rates low, but now he says he likes her for the job.
He said he wanted a reset with Russia and wanted to make overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but now he says relations with Russia are at an alltime low.
He said he would build ‘‘an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern wall’’ between America and Mexico, and Mexico would pay for it. There has been no start to the build yet.
He said Nato was obsolete, but now after hosting Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump says ‘‘Nato is no longer obsolete’’.
He said in 2013 that President Barack Obama shouldn’t go into Syria after chemical attacks were blamed on the Syrian government, saying Obama should ‘‘fix a broken US’’ instead, and if he was to go into Syria, he should seek congressional approval.
On his orders US warships landed 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian air base Trump believed was home to the warplanes that caused the chemical attacks.
When Trump ordered the attack on the Syrian airbase, he did not seek congressional approval. During the campaign for president, Trump said his rival Hillary Clinton wanted to start a war with Syria that would end in World War III.
So what does Trump’s support base think about his plethora of flip flops from a guy who sold himself as a man of the people who said he wanted a radical change in leadership and in foreign policy?
I suspect that his support base has so much purchase in Trump they will never be able to bring themselves to call him hypocrite, or see that right before their eyes, Trump is transforming into a classic war-mongering Republican.
Most probably Trump’s diehard supporters are applauding the tough-guy rhetoric being spun by Counsel to the President Kellyanne Conway. After the Commander-in-Chief authorised the bombing in Syria, Conway, the woman ridiculed for coining the term ‘‘alternative facts’’, described her boss glowingly as ‘‘our very tough, very resolute, very decisive president’’.
The polls for Trump’s presidency, which had been the lowest in history for any American president, received a post bombing bump and Trump basked in his new approval rating.
Not only had his actions drawn approval from his own divided party and praise from detractors like Senators John McCain and Ted Cruz, but he also garnered big-ups from Democrats.
The repeated image of a Tomahawk missile launching from a US warship, and the subsequent condemnation by Russia of Trump’s action, led the narrative away from the toxic tale of Russia’s manipulation of the 2016 American presidential elections.
Trump was no longer smooching up to Putin, it looked like he had gone out of his way to anger the Russian president. Trump immediately pressured Putin to follow suit, to flip-flop like he had and cease backing the Assad regime.
The macho message from the reality TV star was that internationally he was the new sheriff in town, the one calling the shots. At home the turnaround was swift. Trump was getting bipartisan backing, and overseas the approval of foreign leaders.
The bombing had been a circuit breaker as he started to distance himself from Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who was against the bombing in Syria. Bannon had served his purpose as the architect of America first and an isolationist foreign policy that got his candidate elected. That story is over. Now Trump sees himself as quite the global giant.
Bannon is associated with Trump’s low polling in the early days of the presidency, the strategist now linked with what the president might say was a ‘‘very, very horrible’’ time for The Donald.
Like the seasoned reality TV star Trump is, the president has twigged to the idea that the American public liked the bomb, and immediately approved the launching of the biggest non-nuclear MOAB (aka the Mother of All Bombs) against ISIS in Afghanistan.
Phallic images of this biggest bomb with its bright red cover appeared, its size probably goading North Korean leader Kim Jong-un further into a show of his nuclear nuts.
How long will it take for America and its allies to realise the repeat of history, and this time they will be involved in a protracted war fought on several fronts. Trump’s voters will find out the hard and dead way that those at the bottom will pay the toxic cost of war.
Since 2001 more than 2.7 million Americans have been involved in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria with many of those soldiers having served multiple tours.
Trump’s bombs are not one-offs, the Commander-in-Chief has a taste for it now.
After all, launching bombs is so straightforward, so much more liberating than getting bogged down in the strait-jacket of due process.