And everyone in Washington is dumbfounded … again.
President Donald Trump reiterated his bellicose warning to North Korea from earlier in the week, telling reporters at his golf club in New Jersey on Thursday that his threat to bring ‘fire and fury’ if North Korea continued to threaten the United States may not have gone far enough. …
‘I read about in Guam by August 15 … let’s see what he does with Guam,’ Trump said in apparent reference to Kim Jong-un. ‘He does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody has seen before.’
(CNN, August 10, 2017)
Phil Mudd is the ex-deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the FBI’s National Security Branch. More to the point, he is easily CNN’s most confident and strident analyst.
Therefore, it was truly “BREAKING NEWS” when he admitted on today’s edition of the Situation Room that
We were wrong.
This was his reaction to Trump doubling down on his threat to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if it (merely) threatens the United States or any of its allies. Mudd admitted that he and every other analyst were wrong to think Trump’s first-rate advisers would be able to insulate the world from his ill-tempered and ill-informed bluster.
Except that I never thought so. What’s more, I began calling them out months ago in this respect.
It’s worth recalling in this context what putatively sensible Republicans (most notably Senator John McCain of Arizona) insisted was Trump’s only saving grace. It was his decision to nominate cabinet members like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Those Republicans assured the world that these secretaries would have an enlightening effect on Trump. But am I the only one who has yet to see any of that effect? Even worse, there’s often no difference between what we hear from them and what we hear from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Trump’s other PR flaks. These secretaries and those Republicans have some ‘splainin’ to do.
And don’t get me started on the moderating effect his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared were supposed to have on him. I pooh-pooed that liberal fantasy long ago in “Trumpasites Already Gagging on Big Lies (a.k.a. Alternative Facts) and Outrageous Pledges They Swallowed,” January 30, 2017.
(“The Week Trump Kissed Up to Saudi Arabia, Kissed Off Europe, and French Kissed the Philippines,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 20, 2017)
Truth be told, though, only God knows how this nuclear brinkmanship will play out. But it does not bode well knowing that Trump is no JFK and Jong-un no Khrushchev.
So, folks, this might be a good time for a Caribbean vacation. And I recommend extending it until after Labor Day in early September. The [Missiles] of August should have landed by then, making it relatively safe to see what really remains The Day After.
Related commentaries:
Week Trump kissed up…
Trump vs Jong-un…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 8:10 p.m.