Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump isn’t doing something insane every minute of every day. (Wouldn’t that be nice)? Forget that he’s violating the Constitution a mile a minute, ignoring judges and court decisions, covering up and—by omission or commission—encouraging the murders and abductions of Americans and immigrants alike. Forget his rambling, disconnected, word salad speeches. Forget his habitual lies, his paranoia, his psychosis, his lack of any sign of human empathy or remorse, his pathological quest for absolute power, his psychopathic criminality and felonious behavior.
Forget all of the things for which he
should clearly be impeached and/or declared incompetent and removed from office,
and with regard to which Republicans continue to pretend they are “business as
usual”. Forget all that and let’s just look for a second at the lunatic missive
Donald Trump recently sent to his Norwegian counterpart, Prime Minister Jonas
Gahr Støre.
In a letter that was syntactically and
grammatically childish and totally unpresidential—obviously the president’s own
puerile words penned or dictated with no adult supervision in the room—Trump,
addressing the PM by his first name (as if it were going to be a “friendly”
letter, which it wasn’t), basically whined about not getting a Nobel Peace
Prize. As ever, in his inimitably childish style, he not only lodged his
complaint but threatened retribution. The message was, basically, I didn’t get
the peace prize I wanted, so now, I’ll show you! You don’t reward me for peace?
Okay. I’ll give you aggression instead. And it’s all your fault!
Actually, not even that made any
sense whatsoever. The fact is that the Norwegian government plays no direct role
in selecting Nobel Prize laureates. Winners are chosen independently by the
Norwegian Nobel Committee. The only involvement the government has is through
the parliament, which selects the five people who will sit on the Nobel
Committee. But neither the administration nor the legislature exercises any
influence at all on the selection process. So before throwing his little hissy
fit, Trump, who has been fishing for a peace prize (on what basis, your guess
is as good as mine) since 2016, didn’t even bother to bone up on how the Nobel
selection process actually works—and neither, obviously, did any of his very
apparently useless staff.
Below is the actual text of the letter
(which, I’m convinced, my fourth-grade grammar school teacher would have graded
with a D-minus and told him to do it over in accordance with accepted rules for
formal letter-writing):
Dear Jonas:
Considering your Country decided not to
give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel
an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant,
but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of
America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they
have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a
boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there,
also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now,
NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless
we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.
Thank you!
President DJT
Okay. It’s a short letter but there’s a
lot to unpack. First, Trump’s claim of having stopped eight wars is, to say the
very least, highly disputed. Trump exaggerates everything. He even used to
admit to “hyperbole” in talking to the public. (Some might call it “lying”). While
it’s true that the US weighing in on certain violent situations in recent
geopolitics has influenced at least temporarily different outcomes, “ending
eight wars” is a gross exaggeration—one clearly designed to foster his baseless
claim to Nobel laureate status.
Here, by way of example, are a few of the
disputes Trump claims to have solved:
-
The big one, Israel and Hamas. While the current so-called ceasefire might be
considered a major step toward halting a brutal war, Israel continues to attack
Palestinian civilians and Hamas is threatening to end the tenuous truce unless
the Netanyahu government discontinues its lethal strikes and lifts restrictions
on the entrance of humanitarian aid, which it has limited to the point of
constituting a war crime. Netanyahu has made it clear that any second stage in
the deal brokered by the US will not include reconstruction of the devastated
Gaza Strip, but will rather be strictly about “disarming Hamas and
demilitarizing” the war zone. While the US-brokered truce is largely holding,
it is hardly a smashing success. Some 71,000 Palestinias, mostly civilians and
many children, have been slaughtered since these latest hostilities began, and
480 of those fatal Palestinian casualties have occurred since Trump claimed to
have “ended the war” in October of last year.
The decades-long path to a permanent end to the war, which will
only conclude when there is a viable two-state solution, promises to be
arduous, if achievable at all, and won’t be possible without deployment of an
international peacekeeping force, the dismantling of Hamas, and withdrawal of
Israel from Palestinian territory.
-
Israel and Iran. Trump gets credited for ending what was, indeed, a 12-day war.
But it wasn’t exactly through award-winning peace negotiations that he did it.
Back in June, Israel launched attacks on Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities
and its military leaders. Netanyahu then called on Trump to do the same but
with more devastating weapons that Israel didn’t have. The Netanyahu government
played it as a “mutual interest” move, saying that the aim was to keep the
Iranians from building a nuclear weapon. Iran’s political leaders denied that
the government had been engaged in the creation of atomic arms. The Trump
regime negotiated a ceasefire, but not before calling in powerful US airstrikes
on Iran’s nuclear energy facilities at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz. While Arizona
State University’s McCain Institute indicates that there wasn’t “any real end
in sight before President Trump got involved and gave them an ultimatum,” Lawrence
Haas, senior US policy fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, has a
different take. Haas says that while the US was instrumental in cobbling
together a ceasefire, that truce is barely more than a temporary respite from a
continuing “day-to-day cold war.”
-
Egypt and Ethiopia. Mediation efforts, which do not directly involve the United
States, have stalled in what is best described as heightened tensions, but not a
war. At the center of the controversy is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on
the Blue Nile River, inaugurated last September. The decade-old project has
long fostered friction among three countries in the region, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan. Egypt opposed it out of hand,
since that country’s agriculture relies almost entirely on the river for
irrigation. Sudan says that the Renaissance Dam threatens its own dams and has
generated fears of flooding. During his first term Trump’s administration tried
to broker a deal among the three African nations but didn’t manage to get them
to agree. So, not a war and no agreement, despite the Great Prevaricator’s
assertions to the contrary.
-
India and Pakistan. An incident involving the slaying of tourists in
Indian-controlled Kashmir brought India and Pakistan closer to the brink of war
than they had been in many years. But they eventually managed to negotiate a
ceasefire. Trump claims he brokered that truce for which he offered trade
concessions. Pakistan, just in case, thanked Trump, after the US president
starting claiming a diplomatic victory. But India has flatly denied that the US
was ever involved, and has stated specifically that there was never any
conversation between US and Indian leaders regarding trade concessions in
connection with the ceasefire. The Indian government has underscored this by
saying that the negotiations and the truce were completely bilateral. Nor did the tensions ever spill over into
full-blown war.
-
Serbia and Kosovo. The 1998–1999 Kosovo War was an armed conflict between
Serbian/Yugoslav forces and the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
It resulted in more than 10,000 fatalities and the wholesale displacement of
Albanians. NATO intervened in March 1999, with a bombing campaign that forced
Serbian withdrawal and established a UN-administered, largely autonomous
Kosovo. While the Trump regime lists an alleged Serbia-Kosovo conflict as one
of the “wars” Trump has solved, the fact is that there has been zero threat of
war between these neighbors in recent years. Furthermore, Trump has made no significant
contribution to improving their bilateral relations. Tensions have been a
constant since Kosovo, a former province of Serbia, declared independence in
2008. But those tensions have never reached the point of full armed conflict.
And if anyone should get credit for peace in the region, it is NATO-led
Peacekeepers, deployed there for decades, and the 100 nations that have
recognized Kosovo as a free nation. No war, then, and you can’t stop a war that
doesn’t exist. It’s true that, during his first term, Trump negotiated “a
concept” of a deal between the two countries, but most of what was tentatively
agreed to never reached fruition. So, sorry, Mr. President, but no cigar.
-
Rwanda and Congo. Trump has indeed played a key role in peace efforts between
these African neighbors, but the effort wasn’t his alone, and the conflict is
far from over. In the past year, mineral-rich Eastern Congo has seen the
re-emergence of the M23 rebel group, which claims to be protecting territorial
interests. They also claim that some personnel in the Congolese Army were
participants in the horrific 1994 Rwanda Genocide. Rwanda backs M23. Last June,
Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers signed a peace deal at the White House. But
M23 has made it clear that it won’t abide by an agreement from which it was
excluded. Only days after the agreement was signed at the White House, rebels seized a city in Eastern Congo. Qatar
has also sought to cobble together a ceasefire deal between M23 and Congo, but
both parties to the deal continue to accuse each other of violations. So, does
saying you stopped a war count if the war continues?
-
Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is true that Trump last August hosted a meeting of
leaders of these two countries, where they signed their intention to end a
territorial conflict that has lasted since the 1990s. They also committed to an
eventual peace treaty. Foreign ministers from the two nations initialed the
White House agreement, but their parliaments have yet to ratify it and their
leaders have failed to sign it. So is a peace deal no one has formally agreed
to a peace deal, or just an expression of good intentions? What has, however,
actually kept the two working toward normalizing ties is a 2020 Russian-brokered
truce. But that hasn’t kept Azerbaijani forces from launching blitz attacks to
regain territory lost to Armenia. So again, has Trump singlehandedly stopped
that war, and has that war actually ended? Not so much.
But again, let’s put all that “peace hyperbole” aside and just talk about the letter itself.
Go back, if you will, and re-read this self-indulgent,
unhinged, hysterical and demented letter, and ask yourself, honestly, in your
heart of hearts, for yourself and no one else, no matter what your political
leanings might be, if this sort of behavior would be tolerated from any
president but Donald Trump. Although it is laughable to even entertain such an
idea, imagine the outcry from Republicans if this letter were signed by Barrack
Obama or Joe Biden. In fact, imagine the outcry from Democrats, who would
immediately be asking themselves if their governing party’s president had
completely lost his mind.
In the case of Obama it is unimaginable.
Never has there been a more mentally acute president. But even on his worst
day, at the end of his term, when Joe Biden was sometimes vague and seemed at a
loss, it is equally unimaginable that any such letter would ever have made it
off his desk and into circulation. First because, even in his worst senior
moment, it would never have occurred to Biden to write or dictate such a
letter, and second, because he had a real staff made up of real professionals,
not a perverse and acquiescent cabinet of grotesque puppets, who never
question the chief, not even when he is about to make a complete ass of himself
and the country (which occurs just about every day).
From a technical viewpoint, the letter is
schoolboy childish in its content and style. It is littered with the same
strange capitalizations and random punctuations that Trump uses in his social media
posts. But that is nothing compared to the content. These are the words of a US
president—remember, when he writes to another government chief, he is writing
in the name of the US as a whole, not, as he signed it, in that of DJT—which reveal
gross ignorance of history, international law, and self-determination of
nations. But that’s not the worst of it. He even seems totally confused about
whom he is talking to.
There appears to be a complete non
sequitur between the first line and the second. He first, mistakenly, takes
Norway to task for not granting him the Nobel Peace Prize, and then launches
right into his justification for wanting to annex Greenland (at least he didn’t
call it Iceland this time), saying that Denmark can’t protect it from Russia
and China. There appears to be a tacit admission in this that Trump has
absolutely no idea whom he’s talking to.
This begs the question, can Donald Trump
be so abjectly ignorant of geography and geopolitics that he actually believes
that Norway and Denmark are the same country? Or, worse still, could he have
slipped so deeply into dementia or insanity that he just wandered from one
subject to the other without realizing one had nothing to do with the other?
Even the strange and disconnected “Thank you” at the end of the letter seems
totally improper and out of place. Thank you for what? For listening to his
diatribe?
This letter in itself is disturbing and
should scare every American out of his or her wits. Even more so when it
becomes clear that this missive was never vetted, never checked, apparently
never seen—or at least not seen by anyone sane. That is a sobering thought,
because it means that while the chief of staff and secretary of state are busy
brutalizing Americans and stirring up trouble abroad, Donald Trump is on the
loose, demented, unhindered and without supervision in his role as the most
powerful head of state on earth.
Praying folks should be saying, “God
help us.”
If there was ever clear cause to invoke
the 25th Amendment, this letter is it.
No comments:
Post a Comment