Ship of Fools

As he dialed up his rhetoric about North Korea, last week Donald Trump crowed about how "we’re sending an armada" into the Sea of Japan as proof of his toughness. This pronouncement was accompanied by photos released to the media showing the U.S.S. Carl Vinson surrounded by an escort of warships, implying the fleet was en route to the sea surrounding Korea.

But as The New York Times revealed in a story they broke on Tuesday (link here), there was no such armada. A few days earlier, the US Navy had accidentally let the cat out of the bag when it released a photo of the Vinson thousands of miles away, near Indonesia and sailing toward Australia, the opposite direction from Korea.

If you know anything about ships, you know they can't turn on a dime and show up thousands and thousands of miles away in a few hours.

Trump either had no idea what he was talking about or he was boldly lying to the American people. He certainly wasn't bluffing the North Koreans and Chinese; like the Russians and Iranians, they know where American warships are at all times, thanks to satellite monitoring.

If Trump is incompetent and has no idea what the Navy is doing, then this remark about the ships is troubling. That puts him in the same doddering old fool category as Ronald Reagan, who was clueless about what his subordinates were doing under his nose and behind his back.

Considering Trump is surrounded by far-right zealots and anti-LGBT ideologues, the fact that he could be clueless is more than disturbing. The idea that they could really be running things is frightening.

On the other hand, if Trump knew all along there was no armada, then he was once again shamelessly lying simply to make himself appear as martial and commanding. A man who is so quick to lie like this to deceive the people is a man who can never be trusted.

And this is yet another reason why his promises to the LGBT community are less than worthless.