Thank goodness he’s a very stable genius
by digby
Recall what he said about himself that very first day when he went to the CIA and bragged about himself in front of the wall representing all the fallen agents:
I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically — was an academic genius — and then they say, is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me. I’m, like, a smart person.
Here’s what he said about Iraq too:
When I was young — and I think we’re all sort of young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade. We’d win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, “The United States has never lost a war.” And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. We don’t win anymore. The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils” — you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil. Now, I said it for economic reasons. But if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. (Laughter.) Maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.
I would guess that at the time there were plenty of people who thought, “sure he’s a total idiot but he’ll have reasonable people around him. They won’t let him go too far, right?”
Presidents on the brink of war tend to rely on an array of Oval Office assets: teams of experienced advisers, trusted sources of intelligence, strong ties with U.S. allies and credibility with the broad American public. President Trump may be in short supply across nearly all those categories as he faces the prospect of an escalating conflict with Iran.
Trump’s decision to approve an airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, came at a moment in his presidency when his national security team has been depleted by waves of departures and distracted by months of impeachment hearings before Congress.
But even before the Ukraine crisis, Trump had spent much of his first three years in office attacking critical capabilities ordinarily cultivated by commanders in chief: He has disparaged U.S. intelligence agencies, disrupted relationships with European partners and diluted the power of the bully pulpit with thousands of falsehoods.
Trump followers applaud this because they’ve been led to believe that what he did was “drain the swamp” of the “deep state” Democrats who refuse to make America great again. What he did was drain the government of anyone who isn’t a total sycophant, braindead fool or soulless hack.
The ‘best and the brightest” have often gotten things wrong. But damn, putting the worst and the dullest in charge really isn’t an improvement.
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