President Obama’s NPR interview on Monday was replete with amateur psychiatric analysis. Donald Trump is doing well, he said, because of white men’s anxiety over their economic situation in the post-industrial age.
The reason his presidency has been given low marks by the far Right is that he is black, and “in some ways, I may represent change that worries them.” (This is an odd suggestion that the same people were just as tough on the last Democratic president, a white Southern man whom they successfully campaigned to impeach.)
However lightly most members of the public might dismiss Obama’s self-serving analysis of those who think him a poor president, they should not set aside other aspects of the interview with such disregard. For Obama made plain that he continues to underestimate the Islamic State, as though nothing in the past two years has ruffled the certainty of his judgment.
“If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you,” he told NPR. “So I understand why people are concerned about it … Look, the media is pursuing ratings. This is a legitimate news story. I think that, you know, it’s up to the media to make a determination about how they want to cover things.”
The clear implication here is that fears about the Islamic State and criticism of his own long, highly ineffective bombing campaign against it are based mostly on media hype. Cable news, in an effort to boost ratings, has apparently exaggerated the significance of the black flag flying over much of Syria and Iraq for more than a year. Those facts on the ground, and others such as the recent attacks on the softest of soft targets in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., are real and present dangers, not the ephemera of news ratings.
Sadly, the president demonstrated with his comments that he remains hopelessly out of touch. He is not giving up on his longstanding policy of projecting groundless optimism. Either he is deliberately failing to level with the country about how bad the situation is or he believes his own propaganda, which is at least as bad.
In 2014, just months before the Islamic State raced across Syria, captured Iraq’s second-largest city and rolled close to the gates of Baghdad, Obama famously referred to it as a second-rate terrorist group, “the JV” compared to al Qaeda’s varsity team.
More recently, the Paris theater attack, which killed 130 people and wounded nearly three times that number, came just hours after Obama had publicly declared the Islamic State to be “contained.”
It’s as if the terrorist group’s fighters are timing their activities so as to prove Obama wrong each time he utters their name. In which case, how many times is Obama going to have to be taught this hard lesson about underestimating them before he finally learns?
