Saturday, January 18, 2020 10:31 AM
By BRIAN A. HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS – Some politicians are just lucky. Take David McIntosh, for instance. The current Club For Growth chief decided to come back home to run for Congress in 1994, only to have U.S. Rep. Phil Sharp decide to retire and then frontrunner State Auditor Ann Devore forgets to file. McIntosh was then swept into office with the Newt Gingrich tsunami after reporting about $10,000 on his second quarter FEC report. That’s blind, dumb luck.
I think President Trump has this valuable commodity. He runs for president in 2016 against 15 establishment Republicans, who didn’t know how to handle his insults and campaign infomercials. He wins the nomination, then insults Sen. John McCain, Gold Star Mothers, has Billy Bush and the Access Hollywood “Grab ‘em by the pussy” audio tape blow up in his face, then shows up at the next debate with his wife wearing a fuschsia pussy bow. The real “October surprise” was James Comey’s bombshell that he reopened the file on “Crooked Hillary”, when in reality it was the Trump campaign under investigation. Hillary ran a real stinker of a campaign. When her blue wall collapsed, Trump was stunned that he won. He didn’t even have a victory speech drafted.
This dumb luck, thank goodness, appears to have extended into the Trump presidency.
“Little Rocket Man” has become a pen pal. The Chinese either don’t know how to deal with him or they do and we just don’t know it, yet. And now there are the Iranian ayatollahs.
President Trump stuns his Pentagon commanders when he chooses the most severe option when it comes to revenge for the December death of a U.S. contractor months after calling off a retaliatory strike 10 minutes before launch. With little forethought or long-range strategy, he orders the drone assassination of General Suleimani near the Baghdad Airport. A million Iranians fill the streets with tears of grief, while the Iraqi parliament orders U.S. troops out of this fragile nation-building fiasco of a country. The war drums beat.
Meanwhile, Trump and his administration spend the next 10 days struggling with the narrative to justify the attack. They finally settle on the “imminent threat” Suleimani posed to four Middle Eastern U.S. embassies, only to have that rationale undermined when Defense Sec. Mark Esper pulled a Sgt. Schultz “I know noth-ING” on “Face The Nation.” Over on Fox News, Chris Wallace sensed the bovine scatology. “It does seem to be a contradiction; he’s telling Laura Ingraham [of imminent attacks] but in a 75-minute classified briefing, your top national security people never mentioned this to members of Congress, why not?” Wallace asked National Security advisor Robert C. O’Brien on “Fox News Sunday.”
Once again, President Trump was caught in a fib. By Monday, President Trump ended the mangled speculation. This was a tactical decision with no broader strategy. “It doesn’t really matter,” Trump tweeted, “because of his horrible past.”