Columnist Points To Trump Successes, Problem Is He Gets It All Wrong
I am so done with watching the country steamroll toward oblivion based on misinformation and lies about the so-called greatness of trump.
But I am especially sickened when the platform is the Washington Post.
There is nothing that can counterbalance trump’s attempts to overthrow the government and install himself, illegally, as president. Nothing can outweigh trump’s calculated undermining of the American justice system. Nothing can obviate trump’s efforts to violently pit Americans against each other, all to facilitate trump’s reelection. Nothing can trump trump’s coddling of Russia and of other dictators.
Nothing.
But Mark A. Thiessen tried. Thiessen, an apparatchik, regular columnist for the Post, and a Fox News commentator, is a fellow at the right wing American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
Thiessen is a conservative whose voice is meant to balance the opinions of liberals on the Post’s editorial pages. Fair enough.
But Thiessen’s column in the June 13 paper is utterly unbalanced. It was titled, “Biden’s latest attack on Trump is wildly inaccurate; The president played some disingenuous politics with his Normandy speech.”
Thiessen’s claims are wildly inaccurate; I fact checked them on Google in about 10 minutes. That is bad enough but just as slipshod and irresponsible is the Post’s failure to fact check and explain Thiessen’s background and the American Enterprise Institute.
The gist of the column is that Biden was wrong in claiming that trump is an isolationist. Thissen then leapfrogs through a series of bogus assertions to prove that trump was a great leader as he fails to even mention the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by trump supporters or trump’s ongoing claims that he was robbed of a second term by voter fraud.
Brent Orrell, an American Enterprise Institute columnist, eloquently explained why the nation cannot risk another trump term. In his Jan. 20, 2021, column, titled, “No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It,” Orrell wrote, “The price tag of the Trump presidency exceeds its value exponentially. The tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, executive orders, and cultural counter-offensives (‘he fights’) are trinkets compared to the way he has undermined the values and norms required to sustain the rule of law and the constitutional order. These shiny objects were used to distract, mollify, and provide justification for America’s closest brush with authoritarian government since 1789.
“Events over the last few years may have tipped some waverers in one direction or another. But the assault on the Capitol — the ugly climax of a two-months-long effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — settled this dispute decisively. The Capitol’s broken glass and furniture are far easier to fix than the shattered psychological security, social solidarity, and history that told us such a thing could ‘never happen here.’
“And, to be clear, the disaster isn’t over. Our nation will suffer from the aftermath of Trump’s term — perhaps for decades, and certainly long after most of Trump’s policy achievements have been overturned or have withered away. The parasite called Trumpism has reprogrammed the Republican party’s DNA.”
Thiessen. 47, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from 2001 to 2006. He graduated from the Taft School, a, exclusive, private prep school in Watertown, Conn., and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College in 1989. After college, Thiessen moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) from 1989 to 1993. BMSK is notable as two of the founders and name partners, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, became convicted felons during the Trump administration. Manafort was convicted of eight charges and prosecuted on 10 more to which he admitted guilt, and was later charged with dozens more in NY; Stone was convicted for seven felonies. Both were pardoned by trump, one of the firm’s first clients.
From 1995 to 2001, Thiessen was a spokesman and senior policy advisor to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Helms, a senator from 1973 through 2003, was a virulent racist, homophobe and architect of the Christian right.
In 2010, Thiessen published the book “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” which defended the use of the torture technique waterboarding during the Bush administration. Thiessen also wrote that the Obama administration’s rejection of torture might lead to American deaths.
Jane Mayer, author of “The Dark Side,” heavily criticized Thiessen’s book. In a review in the New Yorker, Mayer wrote that Thiessen’s book was “based on a series of slipshod premises” and was “better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts.”
In the book, Thiessen writes, “In the decade before the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al-Qaeda launched repeated attacks against America. In the eight years since the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al-Qaeda has not succeeded in launching one single attack on the homeland or American interests abroad.”
Mayer, however, pointed out that Al-Qaeda had launched numerous attacks targeting Americans since the start of the torture program.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank created in 1938, researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. AEI advocates private enterprise, limited government, and democratic capitalism. Among its positions, AEI supported the defense policy recommendations for the Iraq War and based its environmental policies on its more than two-decade-long opposition to the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change.
AEI scholars have included John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and John Yoo, who researches international law and sovereignty. Bolton, a well-known Hawk, was trump’s National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019. Yoo was known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the George W. Bush administration, when he wrote the controversial “Torture Memos” in the War on Terror.
In the recent Washington Post op-ed, Thiessen tried to show how trump’s bravado succeeded in averting disaster by ordering the Jan. 3, 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Iran military. Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad airport.
Trump ordered the killing after a series of Iranian actions.
In May and June 2019, six oil tankers were sabotaged in the Gulf of Oman. Washington accused Iran of being behind the attacks. Iran denied responsibility. In late December, the U.S. blamed an Iranian-backed militia for a rocket attack which killed an American contractor in northern Iraq. Washington retaliated by bombing bases associated with the militia in Iraq and Syria, killing at least 25 fighters. The bombings sparked a backlash in Iraq and a crowd of protesters attacked the U.S. embassy. Trump blamed Iran for orchestrating the attack and warned it would “pay a very big price.” The assassination soon followed.
Thiessen wrote that “When Iran crossed his (trump’s) red line against killing Americans, Trump did not launch feckless strikes against Iranian proxies the way Biden did.”
(Thiessen apparently was referring to October 2023 strikes that Biden ordered against pro-Tehran militia groups in Syria that had targeted and caused minor injuries to 21 U.S. soldiers. Biden had targeted an ammunition and storage area in an effort to avoid a dangerous regional escalation amid Israel’s war with Hamas.)
Thiessen continued that trump “ordered the U.S. military to target Iran’s terrorist mastermind, Qasem Soleimani — and then warned Tehran that if it retaliated, he had selected ’52 Iranian sites … representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago’ and that ‘those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.’ Iran backed down.”
Actually, the death of Soleimani has done little to deter Iran from using proxies to wage war against Israel. The Brookings Institution reported that killing Soleimani sharply escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Many in the international community reacted with concern and urged restraint and diplomacy.
Five days after the U.S. drone strike, Iran launched a series of missile attacks on U.S. forces based in Iraq, the first known direct engagement between Iran and the U.S. since the naval battle precipitating the Vincennes incident on July 3, 1988.
Regarding ISIS, Thiessen writes that “While the Obama-Biden administration presided over the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which gave rise to the ISIS caliphate, Trump drove the Islamic State from its caliphate — and then ordered the killing of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”
Trump claimed on March 5, 2017, that he defeated ISIS in four weeks. The reality was that by the time trump entered the White House in January 2017, Isis had conquered a large part of Syria and Iraq, including the city of Mosul. American forces defeated ISIS at the battle of Mosul which raged from October 2016 to July 2017, ending six months, not four weeks, into trump’s presidency.
While ISIS does not appear to hold any territory, the terrorist group is still active. In January 2024, it claimed credit for a pair of bombings in Iran, according to The Wall Street Journal. It also took credit for a bombing that killed four people during a Catholic Mass in the Philippines, Al Jazeera reported.
On the topic of Ukraine, Thiessen writes that “After the Obama-Biden administration refused to give Ukraine weapons following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Trump became the first president to provide Ukraine with lethal aid, transferring Javelin antitank missiles that helped Ukraine defend itself when Russia invaded again on Biden’s watch.”
(Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have all delayed or balked at sending lethal aid to Ukraine. Then-president Barack Obama, while providing millions of dollars in aid, resisted sending lethal support, fearing that such a military buildup might provoke Putin to strike. Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy, said it was not clear if earlier military support would have deterred Putin from invading Ukraine.
“I think Putin felt that no matter how well armed Ukraine was, that he would be able to roll over Ukraine,” Townsend said.)
In March 2018, trump approved the $47 million sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 launchers to Ukraine. The missiles were the first lethal military assistance provided to Ukraine by the United States in its fight against Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine since that fighting began in 2014. To that point, the U.S. had provided $1.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine with the majority of it was non-lethal assistance.
Thiessen fails to note that trump had been reluctant to send the missiles because “He wanted to know if the Ukrainians would pay us back,” said a former senior official with direct knowledge of the decision to provide Ukraine with a grant to buy the powerful anti-tank Javelin missiles. Trump authorized the missiles after aides persuaded him that it could be good for U.S. business.
Catherine Croft was Ukraine director at the National Security Council while the missiles were being considered. Croft testified before Congress that trump said that Ukraine should pay for the weapons because “Ukraine was capable of being a wealthy country if it wasn’t for corruption.”
According to published reports, current and former officials persuaded trump to give Ukraine the Javelins after they had convinced trump that if the United States provided the missiles first as aid paid for by a U.S. grant, then the Ukrainians would come back later to buy more with their own funds.
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in March 2018 that while the Javelin sales would “contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of Ukraine” and “help Ukraine build its long-term defense capacity to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” it “will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”
Thiessen conveniently also doesn’t cite the July 25 phone call between trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky indicated that Ukraine was on the brink of buying more Javelins from the United States. It was at this point that Trump said infamously, “I would like you to do us a favor though” and asked Zelensky to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory that claims that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump then suggested that Zelensky also investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who once sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
The phone call led to trump’s first impeachment for soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election to help his re-election bid and obstructing the inquiry by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony.
In another misleading statement, Thiesse writes that “Trump also presided over what he called ‘a colossal rebuilding of the American Armed Forces,’ delivering large increases in defense spending and creating the Space Force as the first new military branch since 1947. Biden, by contrast, has put the United States on track to spend the lowest percent of GDP on defense since President Bill Clinton tried to claim a misguided post-Cold War ‘peace dividend.’”
Here’s a few of those pesky facts again.
The military budget in trump’s final year in office was $740.5 billion. Trump’s final defense budget was the largest since World War II even adjusting for inflation and somewhat contrary to trump’s claims of reducing U.S. influence around the world.
Since Biden took office, his defense budgets have totaled $770 billion, $816 billion and $850 billion.
As far as GDP growth, the U.S. GDP grew during Clinton’s presidency by an average 3.88 percent, which is higher than the average GDP growth under trump (1.62 percent). Military spending has steadily increased since trump took office in January 2017 but the spending is still significantly lower than during the first term of the Obama administration, using figures adjusted for inflation.
Finally, Thiessen claims that trump will stand behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “so long as allies carry their weight when it comes to military spending.”
“As president, Trump got allies to spend hundreds of billions more on our common defense. When Trump left office, allies were spending $130 billion more on defense than they did in 2016 — a figure that was on track to rise to $400 billion by the end of 2024 — and twice as many were meeting their commitments to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. Bruised feelings notwithstanding, Trump left NATO stronger than it had been since the end of the Cold War.”
In February, trump said he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO member country that didn’t “pay” for collective defense.
“I got them to pay up,” trump said. “NATO was busted until I came along. I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer, and you never saw more money pour.”
Now for the cold hard facts.
NATO countries do not pay money into a broad NATO defense budget; each country determines its own level of military spending. No countries are “delinquent” on NATO payments. In 2014, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, NATO members agreed to spend 2 percent of their national gross domestic product on defense spending by 2024. As of 2023, 11 countries met that goal. Many member countries have increased national defense spending since 2014.
Experts said Russia President Vladimir Putin’s attacks in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine spurred the defense spending increases, not threats from trump.
“If any one person is responsible for getting Europeans to spend more on defense, it’s Vladimir Putin,” wrote Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, and a U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO during part of the Obama administration. “Not Donald Trump.”
NATO was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The alliance has 31 members, including the United States. The alliance agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them would constitute an attack against them all, and each member would take action, including armed force.
Justin Logan, the Cato Institute’s defense and foreign policy studies director, said Russia’s attacks affected the allies’ spending decisions.
“Poland’s skyrocketing spending, for instance, has everything to do with fear of Russia,” Logan said. Poland increased its defense spending as a share of GDP from about 2.4 percent in 2022 to 3.9 percent in 2023.
As of July 2023, NATO reported that 11 countries met the 2 percent GDP goal: Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that he expects 18 allies to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense in 2024, a sixfold increase since 2014, when only three allies met the target.
Logan said spending percentages can be misleading. For example, two percent “of the German economy is more than double the entire Estonian economy.” Many of the members meeting the target — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia — offer almost no usable military power.
Facts aside, there may be a few simple ways to mollify propagandists like Thiessen.
First, just drop all the charges against trump and the MAGA-GOP-trumpers will all finally agree that there is justice. Second, the Democrats must agree that whatever the results of the election, trump wins; if he wins the popular and electoral vote, it is a win for democracy and if he loses both votes, it will clearly be a case of voter fraud and once again justice will be served with a trump coronation.