If you want your criticism of President Trump to be taken seriously by audiences other than the one that already agrees with you, here’s a tip: Do your homework about how he compares to his White House predecessors in whatever aspect you happen to be discussing.
Diligence in this regard has been relatively uncommon since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Thence the constant and false claims that Presidents Obama and Bush and others never handled certain issues like the current president, when, in fact, they did, or came very close to it.
Consider, for example, cable news commentator Michael McFaul, who was aghast last week during Trump’s meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. There’s plenty to criticize there, most especially Trump’s choice to run defense for the Kim regime’s brutal torture and eventual murder of American college student Otto Warmbier. But McFaul took it a step too far when he coupled his complaints of the Hanoi summit with a disingenuous, historical revision of the Obama presidency.
“Obama never met once with the Iranian Supreme Leader or president to get the Iranian nuclear deal,” he tweeted.
Obama never met once with the Iranian Supreme Leader or president to get the Iranian nuclear deal.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 28, 2019
Though this is technically true, it omits some important context. The Obama administration most certainly did try to set up a meeting between the U.S. president and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in service of getting the nuclear deal finalized. It’s just that Rouhani turned down the president’s invitation, with the Iranian delegation claiming it was “too complicated.” They still held a “historic phone call.”
But more to the point, what is McFaul trying to accomplish anyway with this critique of the Hanoi summit? Is he actually upset that Trump met with Kim, or is he merely trying to puff up the Obama White House? My guess is it’s the latter, a worthless exercise in partisan cheerleading. That McFaul’s complaint is also disingenuous and misleading elevates it from mere partisan commentary to the factually challenged and/or outright dishonest — probably the latter, given that as the former U.S. ambassador to Russia he knows a bit about the topics in question.
This is the thing I don’t understand about a great deal of Trump criticism. The current administration is a target rich environment. There’s no need to stretch the truth. But so many of his fiercest critics can’t restrain themselves, and it’s undermining the legitimate criticisms of Trump as well.
If this is how the so-called anti-Trump resistance plans on opposing him, it’s going to be a long eight years.
