The View from Right Field

Any Publicity Is Good – As Long As They Spell Your Name Right

My father-in-law used to say that, for politicians, any publicity was good publicity – as long as they spelled your name right.  It didn’t matter what the article said about you.  If they spelled your name right, it was good publicity.

While my father-in-law passed away long before Donald Trump became political, I think he may have gotten President Trump – and the media – exactly right.  Since President Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination three years ago, the media has been “All Trump, All the Time.”  The media loved then-candidate Trump – especially the TV and cable networks – during the Republican primaries.  While other candidates were pretty much ignored, Donald Trump was covered 24-7.  Because people would watch and ratings mean money.

President Trump, the G-7, and United States Foreign Policy

There are many things one could say about the lead up to and aftermath of the G-7 summit.  Let me go with just two.

First, Henry Kissinger once said, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”  Donald Trump seems to take this to an extreme.  With him, it is not that we have no permanent friends or enemies.  It is that we have no friends or enemies.  It is as if everybody is our enemy, in one way or another.  We’ve been fools, and everybody has taken advantage of us.

President Trump’s response to this is to treat everybody the same.  For President Trump, as with businessman Trump, every deal is a one-off.  It’s not a matter of helping friends because they will help us some other time.  It’s not a matter of allies supporting common principles.  We don’t have friends – or if we do, we don’t treat them as I would treat friends.  It’s about getting the most out of whomever we are negotiating with.  And we do it anyway we can.  The only thing that is important is the deal in front of us.  We don’t worry about the next deal because if we have the power, we can win that deal, too. 

Withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear Deal

A few comments on President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal:

1. Nobody can say that President Trump didn’t tell us he was going to do this. The only surprise, I suppose, is it took him so long.

2. President Trump’s ability to withdraw the United States from this agreement is a result of the fact President Obama merely signed the agreement himself, instead of submitting it to the Senate for approval. The problem with the “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”-way of doing things is that your successor has a pen and a phone, too.  And they can use their pen to change whatever you did with your pen.

TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome

We have previously had ODS and BDS (i.e., Obama Derangement Syndrome and Bush Derangement Syndrome [George W. Bush, that is]).  ODS and BDS can be explained as stressing out over President Obama or President Bush all the time, thinking that everything wrong was their fault, and worrying that the country might never recover.  We had a form of CDS (i.e., Clinton Derangement Syndrome) back in the nineties (particularly during Bill Clinton’s second term), even if it wasn’t called that.¹  There was probably a RRDS (i.e., Ronald Reagan Derangement Syndrome), though it, too, would not have had that name.  There definitely was a NDS (i.e., Nixon Derangement Syndrome), which started not in 1969 or 1973 (with Watergate), but in 1948.²  However, I don’t think any of them, even ODS, was as all-consuming as TDS (except maybe NDS during the last few months of Watergate).

TDS has been going full strength since Donald Trump was inaugurated – if not since he was elected (or before).³   It’s hard to read a newspaper or watch a news show (or check your smartphone, for those who get their news that way) without seeing all kinds of things about Donald Trump: good, bad, crazy, porn, etc.  And we have 33 months to go (at a minimum).

@realDonaldTrump’s Tweets About Syria Are Appalling and Irresponsible

It is hard to comprehend how bad President Trump’s recent tweets about Syria have been.  First, though, let’s go through the sequence.

April 8:

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price...

…to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!”

The Advantage of Not Voting for Donald Trump

As the world seems to going pretty much to he** in a handbasket, an argument can be made that Republicans who did not vote for Donald Trump are the lucky ones.

When Democrats come up with more of their ideas to solve the problems of the world with more and more government, we can be glad we’re not Democrats.  Because we understand that the fact the Berlin Wall has been gone for almost 30 years, doesn’t make those kinds of ideas any more sensible now than they were then.

When President Trump comes up with another of his “really unusual” ideas, fires somebody on Twitter, or yet again says something that just isn’t true, we can honestly say that we didn’t vote for him – and not feel like we have to defend him because we supported him. 

“We’ll Be Coming Out of Syria, Like, Very Soon.” Not a Good Idea.

Donald Trump probably wouldn’t like being told that any of his policies are like Barack Obama’s, and former President Obama probably wouldn’t like it either.  But last Thursday, President Trump said, in what was apparently an unscripted aside, during a speech/campaign event in Ohio, that “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS” and that “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.  Let the other people take care of it now.”  All of which sounds an awful like President Obama’s policy in Iraq (and, especially with respect to the last part, Syria). 

President Obama never wanted to be in Iraq.¹  And so, once he got into office, he used the agreement George W. Bush signed with Iraq in 2008, which required the United States to get all of its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011, as the reason (aka excuse) for leaving.  President Obama could have tried to get the agreement changed.  In fact, the expectation probably was that the United States would do so – and that Iraq would agree.  But President Obama didn’t really try.  He wanted out. 

Another Donald Trump Foreign Policy Outrage?

It’s hard to keep up with the latest outrages in Washington.  For a while, earlier this week, it was Donald Trump’s call to Vladimir Putin to “congratulate” him on his reelection – even though President Trump’s national security advisers specifically told him not to congratulate President Putin.  And that President Trump had not, during the call, condemned the recent attempted murder of a former Russian spy in England – even though his advisers had suggested he do that.  The Washington Post went crazy, as did John McCain.  I was thinking of doing the same myself, but then I thought: why.

Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, probably got it closer to right when he said, about the congratulatory call, “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”  Leaders of other countries haven’t done what President Trump did, in terms of congratulating President Putin.  But then some of them haven’t been following up their words, or lack of words (in this case), with real actions on other matters.  They aren’t spending on defense what they have agreed, in NATO, to spend.  Germany, for example, is spending way less than NATO’s 2% target and is committed to another Russian pipeline to potentially increase its dependence on Russian gas – and increase the amount of money Vladimir Putin gets from energy sales.  Obviously, President Trump shouldn’t have done what he did, but what is Vladimir Putin going to pay more attention to: words of congratulation or actual military spending?

The Weakness of Donald Trump

While I was on break, Donald Trump engaged in one of his periodic Twitter assaults on Attorney Jeff Sessions.  President Trump did not like the fact that Attorney General Sessions was having the Department of Justice’s Inspector General investigate the question of possible abuse by the FBI and Justice Department of government surveillance powers, as opposed to having regular DOJ attorneys handle the investigation.  And he ripped the Attorney General a new one in the process.

Looking at the President’s tweet, and the Attorney General’s response, I wondered if President Trump realized how these tweets make him look in other countries.  In Europe, Japan, South Korea/Taiwan, Australasia, etc., they have to be confused and unbelieving.  But that is getting to be common with President Trump, so perhaps it’s not a big deal vis-à-vis them.

How to Get Donald Trump to Act on Russian Meddling in Our Elections

If people really want Donald Trump to take Russian meddling with our elections seriously (which would be a good thing), maybe it would help if they stopped saying President Trump’s election was illegitimate because Russian interference got him elected.  Just a suggestion.