Trump loves to excitedly dish about what his assassination targets say just before they die to entertain his cult members. He’s undoubtedly lying.
Trump held a VIP GOP fundraiser at Mar-a-lago on Friday night and regaled his donors with exciting details of the strike on Suleimani.
In his speech — held inside the gilded ballroom on his Mar-a-Lago property — he claimed that Soleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the strike, which led to his decision to authorize his killing.”How much of this shit do we have to listen to?” Trump asked. “How much are we going to listen to?”Trump did not describe an “imminent threat” that led to his decision to kill Soleimani, the justification used by administration officials in the aftermath of the attack.Instead, he described Soleimani as a “noted terrorist” who “was down on our list” and “was supposed to be in his country” before traveling to other nations in the region.
Trump described in detail watching remotely as Soleimani arrived at Baghdad International Airport, where he was met by Iraqi paramilitary leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah.Trump claimed erroneously that Soleimani was meeting “the head of Hezbollah” (the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group is separate from group led by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis).And he claimed the strike he authorized took out “two for the price of one.”He went on to recount listening to military officials as they watched the strike from “cameras that are miles in the sky.””They’re together sir,” Trump recalled the military officials saying. “Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds. No emotion. ‘2 minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armored vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. 30 seconds. 10, 9, 8 …’ “”Then all of a sudden, boom,” he went on. “‘They’re gone, sir. Cutting off.’ “”I said, where is this guy?” Trump continued. “That was the last I heard from him.”
He also talked again about al-Baghdadi screaming and crying before he died, which nobody else has corroborated. And he complained that the dog got more credit than he did. (I guess that explains why he looked at the dog with such disgust when they brought him to the White House.)
Let’s be clear here. Not only have Trump and his accomplices failed to provide any evidence of an imminent threat, but he is also actively trying to provoke more violence from the Iranians. This sort of cheap trash talk is designed to disrespect the memory of these leaders in a way that makes their followers seek retribution. It is counter-productive, to say the least.
But Trump loves to talk about violence in general. He often describes the gory deaths of crime victims in lurid detail and acts out shooting or stabbing when he appears before his ecstatic followers.
I wrote this a while back. To use a Trumpian phrase: he’s a sick cookie.
At the NRA Convention yesterday:“Right in the middle is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds,” he said. “Yes, that’s right,” he went on. “They don’t have guns, they have knives. And it’s said that there’s blood all over the floors at this hospital. They say it’s as bad as a military-war-zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives.”
(This, btw, is just some wet dream of his. Nobody knows wtf he’s talking about.)
CPAC: “are animals, they cut people. They cut ’em. They cut ’em up in little pieces, and they want them to suffer.
In the White House: “They are killing people. Not necessarily with guns because that is not painful enough,” the president opined. “They want to do it more painfully… and slowly. So they cut them up with knives. They don’t use guns, they use knives because they want long, painful death.”
Harrisburg Pennsylvania: “They don’t shoot people because it’s too fast and not painful. They cut them up into little pieces.”
Long Island, New York: “They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.”
There was this one during the campaign:
And this:
“We’re gonna cut you up sir, we’re gonna cut you up…” (Watch from where this starts to 3:30. It’s just pathetic.)
He has a lurid, violent imagination and he’s revealed it repeatedly in public. It’s why he valorizes war criminals and says he loves torture.
Apparently, his followers do too. They cheer when he does it.