24 July 2018

Highly Unstable

Once again Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to remind the world that he's an unstable threat to peace and a national embarrassment for the United States. On Sunday night, he tweeted a sputtering all-cap tirade directed at Iranian president Hassan Rouhani (details here) that threatened war.

As Simon Tisdall wrote at The Guardian (link here), "Trump’s escalation does not appear premeditated or thought through. He faced intense bipartisan criticism after last week’s inept summit with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin. He is under relentless pressure from the official inquiry into alleged 2016 campaign collusion with Russia. Trump may have been looking for an easy target on which to vent his pent-up frustration."

Tisdall didn't mention one other possibility: the Twitter tantrum was yet another attempt to divert public attention from Trump's groveling before Vladimir Putin last week in Helsinki, from the public outrage at Trump's appeasement of Russia, and the forthcoming criminal trial of Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort, which begins at the end of this month.

When Trump threatens world leaders like this, and then does nothing more than threaten, and then capitulates to them like he did with North Korea's dictator, he ends up looking weak, notwithstanding he probably thinks it makes him look strong. People learn quickly with empty threats that the old dog has no teeth.

Some worry that Trump's regularly rushing to make reckless threats against Iran and his cozying up to Putin foreshadow attempts to provoke Tehran into a war. Given the President's frequent lapses of common sense and good judgment, not to mention a total lack of impulse control, suggest this is more than a remote possibility.

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