Reality bites. And it’s biting Trump right where it hurts.
Michael Tomasky makes what should be an obvious observation by the media but isn’t. He tells the story of the American Ambassador to France offering then President Charles DeGaulle the evidence that the Russians had put nuclear weapons in Cuba and DeGaulle pushing the documents away saying: “I don’t need to see these photos. If the president of the United States says it, that’s good enough for me.”
He asks if anyone can imagine a foreign leader saying that about an American president today? Not bloody likely …
All of them from Johnson up to Bush had wide “credibility gaps” that eventually dissolved any trust foreign governments have in the US Government on issues of war and peace. Trump, of course, has taken it to a totally different level. He doesn’t have a credibility gap. He simply has no credibility at all.
Tomasky writes that he originally thought the Iran strike on Suleimani would be a plus for Trump. He took out a bad guy yadda, yadda, yadda. And just as it has been in the past Americans backed Trump’s move by a narrow plurality.
But boy are they skeptical of his competence:
Then came that stunning USA Today poll. It showed that yes, an unimpressive plurality approved of the strike (42 for and 33 against, with 25 percent not sure). But when respondents were asked whether the attack made the United States more or less safe, people said less safe by a whopping 55 to 24 percent. The biggest single chunk, 28 percent, said “much less safe.” Also, by 52-to-34, people called Trump’s behavior toward Iran “reckless,” and by a slam-dunk 52-to-8, they said the killing would make it more likely that Iran develops nuclear weapons.
Rest assured, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have come out of last week with numbers like that. Neither would any other president. But Trump did.
Tomasky points out:
It turns out that when you lie 16,000 times in three years, it kinda hurts your credibility. Also jumping from this idea to that one like a frog hopping between stones during a storm, that doesn’t help much either. Also saying well, it was one embassy that had been threatened, then that it was four. Also those disastrous briefings for House members and senators, where the briefers said absolutely nothing specific about these threats and everyone in the room (everyone not drunk on Trump Kool-Aid anyway) smelled the steaming horseshit from a mile away. ..
But mostly it’s the lies. The blanket of lies, the cloud of lies, the ceaseless parade of lies, lies, lies that come out of Trump’s mouth literally every time he opens it. Outside of MAGAmerica, everybody has long since figured out not to rely on a word he says.
It is not good when a president is totally mistrusted on this level. Sure, we should always be skeptical. And it’s perfectly fair for foreign governments to demand that they see the US evidence of any threat. We haven’t always been on the up-and-up, needless to say. But the level of dishonesty that comes out of this White House and the president’s own mouth means that the US is now in the position of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. That is not a good position for a Superpower to be in.