Trump loses again, as predicted (Updated)
So far, Donald Trump’s ingenious Syrian strategy of serving up the U.S.-allied Kurds to a massacre, handing Kurdish land in northern Syria to Turkish invaders, and then allowing Vladimir Putin to sweep in, along with his friend Bashar al-Assad, to take control of the entire region, is working out brilliantly.
Oh, sorry, that wasn’t Trump’s plan? That was just what I said would be the precise result of Trump’s mindless concession to Erdogan’s demands in exchange for nothing but a condescending pat on the head from the latest two-bit tyrant to outwit him? (I admit that describing someone as having outwitted Donald Trump is like describing someone as having out-jumped a slug.)
As I read about the perfect fruition of my predicted fallout, at AP News, one sentence jumped out at me as extraordinary and telling: “The new accord was reached by Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, after six hours of negotiations as they pored over maps of Syria in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.”
Can you imagine Donald Trump “poring over maps of Syria”? Can you imagine Donald Trump figuring out how to unfold a map, let alone read one? Can you imagine him having the attention span required to spend six hours discussing complicated geopolitical arrangements, involving the futures of several countries and the fates of hundreds of thousands of people, in the face of globally ambitious and clever world leaders — of for that matter with a class of junior high school students — and understanding anything that anyone was talking about?
If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then I admire your pluck in the face of the avalanche of counterevidence. If you answered rationally, but are still inclined to try to defend Trump’s decisions and his presidency, even provisionally, against his critics, then I can only ask how you justify making excuses for a “leader of the free world” whom you admit to being incapable of the level of mental functioning required of a junior high school class president.
And now I see that Trump is, as usual, declaring his reality TV “cease-fire” a “big success,” and therefore lifting the reality TV sanctions he imposed on Turkey a few days ago. His “big success” consists in allowing Putin to walk in and take control of the area, in the process permanently divesting the Kurds of the area that had, until Trump unleashed Erdogan’s attempted genocide, been their little slice of autonomy, but which is now their graveyard and forbidden zone thanks to Trump and his big successful friends, aka the most vicious tyrants to whom Trump could find a way to kowtow this week.
He tried to do the same thing in Korea. He tried to do the same thing to Ukraine. He has been doing the same thing to the United States of America for almost three years. Success, in his view, almost invariably means washing his tiny hands of any difficult situation and allowing others to achieve a “solution” that only looks like stability to one who cannot understand the difference between peaceful coexistence and the crushing of all dissent. This cowardly, incompetent, uneducated, and singularly mendacious entity is a wrecking ball swinging through the ruins of what was once the civilized world.
“But the only alternative is to vote for a socialist.” First of all, that is manifestly false. Secondly, whose fault is that?
