If the self-described “commander in chief of the United States” had surfaced to merely announce the good news – that the leader of ISIS had been whacked by an American commando unit – he might have seemed fleetingly presidential. Barack Obama aced it when he shared the news about bin Laden and quickly took his leave. But Donald Trump is terminally hostage to his serial lies and insecurities. He turned his Sunday announcement into a self-pity party.
There was much to be nauseated about – the way he relished the gory details (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “died like a dog”), which is how terrorists talk; the way he sought to describe al-Baghdadi’s last moments in the most humiliating terms (“he was whimpering and crying and screaming”), although I doubt Trump could see or hear that on the drone video; the way he informed Russia in advance (natch), but refused to alert top congressional leaders; the way he congratulated himself for what happened “at my direction” (by contrast, in 2012 he tweeted this advice: “Stop congratulating Obama for killing bin Laden”).
Speaking of what happened at his “direction”: His recent decision to abruptly retreat from Syria actually imperiled the mission, which was long in the works; according to “more than a half-dozen Pentagon, military, intelligence, and counterterrorism officials,” Pentagon planners had to hasten their timetable and stage a “risky night raid” while they still had troops and spies on the ground. According to these national security sources, “Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death occurred largely in spite of Mr. Trump’s actions.”
That was all bad enough. But this riff was arguably the worst:
“This (ISIS killing) is the biggest thing there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was very big but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center…
“You know, if you read my book, there was a book just before the World Trade Center came down. And I don’t get any credit for this but that’s OK. I never do. But here we are. I wrote a book, a really very successful book and in that book about a year before the World Trade Center was blown up, I said there is somebody named Osama bin Laden, you better kill him or take him out, something to that effect, he’s big trouble. Now, I wasn’t in government. I was building buildings and doing what I did but I always found it fascinating. But I saw this man, tall, handsome, very charismatic making horrible statements about wanting to destroy our country. And I’m writing a book. I think I wrote 12 books. All did very well. And I’m writing a book, World Trade Center had not come down. I think it was about, if you check it was a year before the World Trade Center came down…And no one heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center.
“But about a year, a year and a half before the World Trade Center, before the book came out, I was talking about Osama bin Laden, ‘you have to kill him, you have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me. And to this day I get people coming up to me and they said ‘you know what, one of the most amazing things I’ve seen about you is that you predicted that Osama bin Laden had to be killed before he knocked down the World Trade Center.’ It’s true. Most of the press doesn’t want to write that but it is true. If you go back and look at my book, I think it’s ‘The America We Deserve.’ I made a prediction — let’s put it this way, if they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different.”
That’s a lot to unpack, but we can probably start with his I’m-better-than-Obama braggadocio, his belief that the ISIS guy was “bigger” than the al Qaeda guy. (Was his Sunday announcement really the opportune time to measure penises?) Perhaps he’d like to explain his critique to the families of the 3000 Americans who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on 9/11.
But all his subsequent jabber – how prescient he was about bin Laden, how he wrote a book saying that bin Laden should be killed, how he even predicted it but “nobody listened to me” – was a tangled web of lies. The book, published in January 2000, referred to bin Laden a grand total of once. He called bin Laden “a shadowy figure with no fixed address,” mentioned that the terrorist had survived a U.S. bombing, and said in general that our foreign policy should be less “haphazard.” That was it. No warning that bin Laden was a threat; no demand that he be killed; no prediction that he would. (And if you believe what he said today – that “people” come up to him to praise his “amazing” prescience – I have a case of Trump Steaks to sell you.)
And nobody needed to listen to Trump in 2000, because bin Laden was already infamous. There were numerous reports in 1999 that bin Laden was a major threat on our shores. And the U.S. bombing to which Trump briefly referred took place in 1998, when it was already clear that he was on America’s radar.
If only Trump had just shared the good news and shut up. How hard is that? Too hard, apparently, for a needy soul on the precipice of being impeached.