President Trump caught grief from both the usual and unusual cable news critics Friday morning after he approved and then scuttled retaliatory strikes against Iran.
At “Fox and Friends,” for example, the normally slavishly devoted Brian Kilmeade was miffed that the president had chosen against the attacks.
“North Korea is watching,” the Fox host complained. “All our enemies are watching. Of course, Assad is watching. And for seven weeks, nothing but provocations.”
The White House was this close Thursday evening to launching retaliatory strikes against Iran for its downing of an unmanned U.S. drone this week. Iranian agents are also suspected of damaging two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman last Thursday. However, the president said Friday morning he decided against the attacks at the last minute after being informed that the planned U.S. military strikes would likely lead to at least 150 casualties.
But even before Trump had given his reasons for calling off the planned attack, Kilmeade was already deep in the weeds of offering his own amateur foreign policy analysis.
“Every day that passes by when they blow up four tankers and we do nothing and they blow up a drone that costs $130 million and we do nothing. We know it’s not going to end there. At some point, in the Middle East, no action looks like weakness. And weakness begets more attacks,” the Fox host argued.
Kilmeade said later in the same program, “[O]ne quote that just sticks out with me — and it still holds up today — Thomas Jefferson to John Adams. He said, ‘If you don’t punish the first insult, more are sure to follow.’ And what we have seen is, we didn’t punish the first insult and more are to follow.”
“Where is America’s response to Iran’s belligerence?” he continued in an increasingly frantic, despairing tone.
Over at MSNBC, there was no similar desire for armed conflict with Iran, but host Joe Scarborough, an early Trump backer who pretends now that he did not directly support the then-GOP candidate’s 2016 primary campaign, and his guests found a way nonetheless to go after the president.
“Who feels comfortable that we are proceeding in [a clearly defined manner on foreign policy] as opposed to in a kind of ad hoc, chaotic way, where no one really knows who is in charge, no one really knows who is running this policy and no one really knows where the president’s headed?” asked supposed “insider” John Heilemann.
“It feels like ad hocracy to me, where the president’s competing impulses are pulling him in different directions rather than some kind of orderly procession to try to pursue a clear objective,” he added.
Scarborough followed up with his own amateur psychoanalysis of the president’s approach to the Iran situation.
Trump “loves to insult, loves to bully and then pulls back,” the host explained.
“I actually do think that a very definite trend is emerging, we’ve been talking about it for some time and also talking about the limits of Donald Trump’s approach which is to threaten, to bully, to insult, and then to pull back,” he added, “but what happens when our adversaries understand that he’s never going to follow through?”
Scarborough was also careful to say he is “glad Donald Trump stopped this operation at the last moment,” but managed still to work in criticisms about the White House’s apparently disastrous and seemingly nonsensical approach to foreign policy.
I don’t know: If having a chaotic White House is the price we pay to avoid another potentially drawn-out, costly, and deadly conflict in the Middle East, I think that is a fair trade.
