Will Dick Cheney endorse the Donald?
by digby
I wrote about Trump’s dance around the torture question for Salon today:
Is there a luckier politician in America than Donald Trump? Just as he starts to lose some altitude in the race, having to face a certain deluge of media scrutiny all day Sunday and Monday in the wake of the Super Saturday Ted Cruz boomlet, former first lady Nancy Reagan dies, suppressing the coverage of the presidential race and halting the momentum of the growing narrative of Trump weakening. He didn’t plan this, of course, but it’s a testament to his good luck and timing that it happened when it did. He needed something to change the coverage and this did very nicely.
On Saturday night, Trump had given one of the most desultory victory speeches of his short political career. He’d won Louisiana but lost the caucuses in Kansas and Maine to Ted Cruz and had a close call in Kentucky. Compared to the glorious win on Super Tuesday it wasn’t much to brag about. But then a lot had happened in the meantime.
The establishment had sent out Mitt Romney to make a stirring speech apparently designed to keep everyone in the race long enough to deny Trump the needed delegate count going into the convention. (Romney seems to think it will be acceptable to the Republican rank and file for a candidate who didn’t win the most delegates to get the nomination. Has he met any Trump voters?)
Trump didn’t seem particularly phased by Romney’s cri de guerre but it was clear that Marco Rubio’s suicidal decision to roll around in the mud with Trump had left some marks. That comment about his “small hands” particularly got under his skin and he couldn’t leave it alone when he debated Rubio, Cruz and Kasich on Thursday night on Fox.
Before a national audience Trump raised up his hands and said:
I have to say this, I have to say this. He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.
CNN’s headline was “Donald Trump defends size of his penis.” Later in the spin room he could be seen comparing the size of his hands with reporters in the room.
Trump in spin room just now comparing hand size with an entertainment reporter. pic.twitter.com/EHgK7sq1Qz— Jacob Rascon (@Jacobnbc) March 4, 2016
It was not a good night for Trump. Actually, it was a bad night for all the candidates. Rubio is permanently scarred by his decision to try to out-Trump Trump with insults, since it made him seem like a nasty teenager, which was the last thing the callow candidate needed. And Cruz was … Cruz, unfortunately battling something unpleasant looking on his lip (which he ate) that made half the people in the country google “what that thing on Cruz’s lip?” Kasich recited his resume in answer to every question failing somehow to recognize that nobody in the Republican party gives a damn.
But Trump fared the worst, coming in for the kind of scrutiny he hasn’t faced before. And there was one answer that seemed to shock the moderators and the audience alike. Moderator Brett Baier noted that a number of foreign policy experts had written a letter that week saying that his “expansive use of torture” and the targeting of terrorists families is inexcusable and asked what he would do if the military refused to carry out such illegal orders. Trump replied:
TRUMP: They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.
Let me just tell you, you look at the Middle East. They’re chopping off heads. They’re chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way. They’re drowning people in steel cages. And he — now we’re talking about waterboarding.
This really started with Ted, a question was asked of Ted last — two debates ago about waterboarding. And Ted was, you know, having a hard time with that question, to be totally honest with you. They then came to me, what do you think of waterboarding? I said it’s fine. And if we want to go stronger, I’d go stronger, too, because, frankly…(APPLAUSE)… that’s the way I feel. Can you imagine — can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East, that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding. That’s my opinion.BAIER: But targeting terrorists’ families?(APPLAUSE)TRUMP: And — and — and — I’m a leader. I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.
BAIER: Even targeting terrorists’ families?
TRUMP: Well, look, you know, when a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center, and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went — and, by the way, it wasn’t Iraq — but they went back to a certain territory, they knew what was happening. The wife knew exactly what was happening.
They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went, and they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon, and probably trying to fly into the White House, except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane. All right?
It’s worth pointing out that Trump was saying these things long before the debate with Ted Cruz. He’d first answered the question the same way back on August on “This Week.” After Paris and San Bernardino he added it into the stump speech with ever more lurid details:
Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I’d approve it, you bet your ass — in a heartbeat.“And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.They’ll say, ‘oh it has no value’, well I know people, very, very important people and they want to be politically correct and I see some people taking on television, ‘well I don’t know if it works’ and they tell me later on, ‘it works, it works, believe me, it works’.“And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing to us.”
When Trump called Cruz a pussy at a rally in Manchester, NH, it was because Cruz failed to enthusiastically endorse this form of torture in a debate. (In fact, Cruz cited the notorious John Yoo memo as justification for waterboarding in that debate, claiming that it isn’t torture at all.) Trump believes that it is torture and that the United States should openly use it and admit to using it. In his view, the reason people do bad things in this world is because the United States is not “strong” enough, by which he means ruthlessly violent enough.
But really, why shouldn’t Donald Trump believe this? The former Vice President of the United States goes on television and says he’d waterboard again “in a heartbeat,” and claims that the decision to use it is “a no-brainer.” And the likes of former CIA Director Michael Hayden getting on a high horse and superciliously telling Trump that he’d have to “bring his own bucket” if he planned to waterboard is especially rich considering his previous stances on the subject of torture. All these “foreign policy experts” acting shocked is just a little too little, a little too late. The cheering you hear from Trump’s crowds whenever he talks about waterboarding shows just how normalized this sick behavior has become. Perhaps if some of these people had spoken up earlier … or better yet, if some of them had not been complicit in doing it in the first place, Trump wouldn’t think it’s acceptable to b lithely cheer lead for barbarity on on the campaign trail.