Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[L]ast week’s American attack on a Syrian airfield sent the indelibly clear message that 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles are worth a thousand words of dissembling from Donald Trump and his staff to distract from alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia to swing the election. Unfortunately, the attack gleaned the kind of accolades to which Trump is hooked, and might well become a gateway drug, since 24 hours later the president announced that we had an aircraft carrier strike group steaming toward the Korean peninsula.
Although we learned several days later that — in typical Trump fashion — the Navy was actually headed in the opposite direction as the briefing was being conducted — Australia, to be exact — and couldn’t reliably arrive off Korea until perhaps April 25.
The collective reaction, after the horrific video footage of Syrian children convulsively gasping for breath as they died, was that the attack was justifiable, given the relentless barbarism of President Bashar al-Assad during a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and created a global refugee crisis. Trump was praised as “presidential” for the second time since his inauguration, the first being 45 minutes of mostly mistake-free reading off a teleprompter.
Whether or not ordering someone to push lethal buttons is “presidential,” might be open to speculation, but our military action in the Mideast certainly should not be. Experience over the last couple of decades indicates that however politically enchanting intervention in that part of the world might initially be, the outrage over slaughtered women and children eventually gives way to outrage over the coffins of soldiers being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Foreign policy experts have been mystified by the apparent disconnect between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions while White House staffers seem to be on completely different pages explaining how we arrived at a missile attack after trumpeting “America First” for the last year of campaigning and first months in office. The alt right — staunch supporters until now — has been particularly outraged, denouncing the raid as a “betrayal” of the base prompting speculation that Steve Bannon’s days might be numbered.
Experience over the last couple of decades indicates that however politically enchanting intervention in that part of the world might initially be, the outrage over slaughtered women and children eventually gives way to outrage over the coffins of soldiers being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
But Trump’s inconsistency should be unsurprising since many of his assertions on the campaign trail as well as his promises to right the ship were far fetched, often bordering on impossible. For instance, his promise to bring back coal mining jobs was nothing more than a self-serving stunt, transitioning poorly from campaign rhetoric to the sobering reality of exactly why those jobs left and why they’re likely not coming back. Despite the president’s insistence that environmental regulations were shutting the damper on the coal industry and his subsequent rollback of clean air standards, the truth of the matter is that Candidate Trump made promises that President Trump cannot keep.
Coal mining jobs have been in decline for decades largely due to automation. Since 1980 mining has shed 59 percent of its workforce while coal production increased by 8 percent. The shift to open pit mines has also taken its toll on mining jobs since it requires far fewer workers and competition from other, theoretically cleaner and much cheaper fuels such as natural gas and renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power are also chipping away at mining jobs.
Waffling on Mideast policy or not actually having one, dishonesty regarding coal jobs, or environmental regulations all easily generalize into the prevailing Republican agenda, already a toxic stew of of smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand and good, old fashioned BS. The duplicity required to distract from the FBI and congressional investigations into the Trump campaign-Russia connection is the human equivalent of throwing a stick to distract a lustful dog eying your leg.
Unfortunately for the president and his party, and despite their best effort to remain under the radar, Trump’s impulsivity has begun taking its toll. An entire industry has sprung up around his social media diatribes. Think of it as the “Department of What-the-President-Meant-Was.” Perhaps another role for Jared Kushner might be “Secretary of Fabrication,” where the royal son-in-law could oversee the retroactive context creation for whatever deranged nonsense emerges from the presidential lips.
The missile attack itself appears to have have caused at least as many problems as it solved. Its utility as a distraction collapsed almost immediately and it did minimal strategic damage according to Syrian officials. Indeed planes were taking off the next day, terrorizing civilians with barrel bombs in the same town that suffered the sarin gas attack that triggered Trump’s decision to retaliate. Diplomatic tensions have increased with Russia’s support for Assad remaining firm while counter accusing the United States of having crossed a red line, promising retaliation “with force” if it happens again. (Those threats were walked back somewhat by the Kremlin the next day.)
Meanwhile, the president appears to have gone kind of Twitter incommunicado, allowing his minions to answer questions about the situation that might expose his shaky grasp of the Middle East’s complexity (or the president of North Korea’s name). Consequently, we are left with a kind of collective incoherence from a variety of inexperienced staffers providing contradictory, long-winded non-sequiturs, red herrings or transparent diversionary tactics, that exhaust modern attention spans almost instantaneously, leaving confused listeners unable to categorize what they just heard. Mission accomplished!
