Media pundits expressed skepticism Friday night about the motive for President Trump’s decision to strike Syria, saying the intervention may have been ordered to distract from negative publicity and legal troubles back home.
Rachel Maddow was one of the first on Friday to question Trump’s true motivations surrounding the strike. The MSNBC host suggested that there is a “perception” the president may have made the orders to distract from his ongoing scandals back in America.
“It is worth considering on a night like tonight that there are national security consequences to having a presidency that is as chaotic as Mr. Trump’s presidency, a presidency that is as consumed by scandal and criminal intrigue as his presidency is,” Maddow said.
“The perception that the president may have ordered these strikes in part because of scandal will affect the impact and the effectiveness of these military strikes. Unavoidably,” she said. “Even if the tail is not wagging the dog,” she added, referring to the 1997 Oscar-nominated film “Wag the Dog,” which came out right before the outbreak of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual affair scandal with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and told the story of a Hollywood effort to distract from a presidential sex controversy.
Maddow: Trump’s personal turmoil taints U.S. military options and national security pic.twitter.com/1t0OSlAMt5
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) April 14, 2018
Comedian Bill Maher joked on his HBO show “Real Time” on Friday that the Syrian strikes should have been called “Operation Desert Stormy,” in reference to the adult film star who claims to have had an affair with Trump and has been engaged in a legal battle with the president.
Maher also quipped that Trump was given the green light to strike Syria from “Fox & Friends.”
CNN’s Ana Navarro, a vocal Trump critic, theorized that Trump’s strike may have been ordered as a distraction from news about former FBI James Comey, who has a new book coming out, and the FBI raid on the home and office of Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
It is true Trump may have ordered strikes against Syria to distract attention from Comey book & Cohen investigation
It is true Assad is committing genocide. The international community cannot, must not allow him to kill Syrians ppl w/impunity
The two, are not mutually exclusive
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) April 14, 2018
While some members of the media floated theories that Trump had ulterior motives while ordering the attacks, others lashed out because it appeared to be inconsistent with his 2016 campaign pledges.
Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham both questioned Trump’s decision to strike Syria, according to the Daily Beast.
Ingraham exchanged blows with former White House aide Sebastian Gorka Friday, saying she’d learned from her support of previous wars that intervention can be costly.
Trump announced on Friday that he had ordered the U.S. military to launch a “precision strike” against Syria, directed at chemical weapons production facilities. “A short time ago, I ordered the United States Armed Forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons,” Trump said Friday at the White House.
Trump said Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons are the “crimes of a monster,” he added that the U.S. and its allies must ensure an end to the use of these weapons.
The chemical weapons attack, which happened days ago, killed more than 40 people. It occurred a little more than a year after the U.S. fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria in response to a sarin gas attack by the Assad regime last April.
