On Friday, White House doctors and advisers convinced President Trump that his bout of Covid-19 was so severe, he had to be helicoptered to Walter Reed Medical Center for intensive care. Trust me, this inflicted such a blow to his ego, they probably had to threaten to withhold his oxygen tubes to get him to comply.
After all, he prizes his strongman image above all else, including his and everyone else’s health. Nothing betrayed this quite like the way he ordered doctors at Walter Reed to approve his discharge on Monday.
This required his head doctor to commit medical malpractice by saying, on the one hand, that Trump met all hospital discharge criteria; while on the other, that Trump was “not yet out of the woods.”
But none of that should surprise anyone – notwithstanding the obvious peril it portends for his health. Instead, what should surprise everyone is the number of national-security experts who have been scaremongering all over TV since Friday.
Specifically, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, led the chorus of those wargaming, for all the world to see, how rogue nations could see Trump’s mere hospitalization (i.e., not even his incapacitation) as an invitation to attack US interests – at home and abroad.
This surprised me in two equally troubling ways:
- They instilled the patently unfounded fear that an incapacitated president automatically incapacitates the entire US national security apparatus, including military forces – at home and abroad. But nothing could be further from the truth. And, yes, the military can function as normal even with top brass at the Pentagon in quarantine because their reckless commander in chief set off a chain reaction that exposed them all to Covid-19.
- If their wargaming had any merit, the effect would have been more to goad rogue nations to attack than to warn us to be on guard.
But here is perhaps the most glaring reason why their attempt to sound the alarm was tantamount to the proverbial closing the barn door after the horse has bolted:
As Kim wooed Trump with ‘love letters,’ he kept building his nuclear capability, intelligence shows. … The result, two years after the start of Trump’s unconventional peace overture, is a North Korea that U.S. officials say is better armed, with a growing nuclear arsenal scattered across a network of bunkers newly hardened against a potential U.S. airstrike.
Kim meanwhile has gained an advantage that has eluded other North Korean leaders: a personal friendship with a U.S. president.
(SF Gate, September 30, 2020)
Clearly, North Korea did not need to wait for an incapacitated Trump to act in ways inimical to US interests. To the contrary, North Korea clearly knew it could depend on Trump’s self-aggrandizing and self-centered complicity in doing so.
What’s more, it is not alone in exploiting Trump’s willful complicity. Because Russia has demonstrated time and again this fallacy of thinking rogue nations need an incapacitated Trump to, well, go rogue.
After all, Russia launched cyberattacks to undermine US elections, put bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan, and even attacked US soldiers directly in Syria. And, far from objecting, or even retaliating as was warranted, a pre-Covid Trump reacted by pretending it was all fake news.
Not to mention the way China has violated international law and defied US power by militarizing disputed islands in the South China Sea.
The country’s aggressive territorial claims and island militarization have put neighboring countries and the United States on the defensive, even as President Trump’s administration is stepping up efforts to highlight China’s controversial island-building campaign.
(The New York Times, September 20, 2018)
Again, all of this demonstrates why nobody has any reason to fear rogue nations seizing Trump’s hospitalization to attack the United States – in any way. Because they have been exploiting his congenital vanity, gullibility, and venality to do so – in all manner of ways – throughout his presidency.
In a similar vein, nobody has any reason to fear Covid Trump acting any more rashly or irrationally than pre-Covid Trump has acted throughout his presidency.
Apropos of which, allies determined long ago that Trump’s chaotic and incompetent leadership had rendered America unreliable, if not unhinged. Here in part is how I quoted German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressing their disillusionment and disaffection in “The Week Trump Kissed Up to Saudi Arabia, Kissed Off Europe, and French Kissed the Philippines,” May 30, 2017:
________
He hurled patently misguided allegations about Europeans sponging off American taxpayers for their national defense, respectively. That was bad enough. But he added injury when he physically pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro – who happened to be standing where Trump felt he needed to be to preen as top peacock for a routine photo op.
Alas, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel telegraphed, the fallout might prove seismic and historic:
Speaking at a beer hall rally in Munich on Sunday, Merkel suggested that the era when Europe could rely on the United States may be coming to an end. …
‘I experienced that in the last a few days, and therefore I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands … we have to fight for our own future and destiny as Europeans.’
(The Washington Post, May 29, 2017)
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That said, I am mindful that I buried the lead on North Korea by opening with the reality-TV spectacle Trump made of being helicoptered to and from the hospital. But this is an unwitting testament to the fact that Trump is the personification of the shiny ball that is his dystopian presidency.
Because he invariably compels the world to focus on his distracting antics while ignoring matters of life and death. To be fair, though, I am on record presaging that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would play Trump exactly as this report documents.
Specifically, the world was “shocked, shocked” when North Korea launched a barrage of missiles in defiance of the US and South Korea warning against doing so. But here is how I reacted in “Russia, Iran, and North Korea Making Trump Look like a Chump,” March 7, 2017:
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Despite his campaign boasts, Trump’s only reaction has been to tweet the media down rabbit holes, chasing one carrot stick of a conspiracy after another. Incidentally, unlike the Pavlovian reporters and pundits who go burrowing every time, I won’t dignify his conspiracies by commenting on them.
In any case, the real story here is not the international laughingstock Trump is making of his presidency with his ignorant and disruptive tweets, which are also destroying what little credibility he had upon assuming the office. Rather, it’s the way events — at home and abroad — are exposing his P.T. Barnumesque bluster as all show and no action.
_________
And so it was, and shall continue to be – at home and abroad.
But thank God for former UN ambassador Susan Rice. Because she sounded the only appropriate, even if discordant note, by assuring the American people and warning America’s enemies that the US military would probably function even better if Trump were incapacitated.
This is why Joe Biden would do well to make Rice his very first Cabinet appointment – as secretary of state.
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