Contributors

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Is Trump About to Start a War of Distraction?

Today the White House announced that Donald Trump had canceled his trip to South America, where he was supposed to attend the Summit of the Americas. The reason? To "oversee the American response to Syria and to monitor developments around the world."

But in reality he cancelled the trip because of the raid on the offices, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, the lawyer who paid porn star Stormy Daniels hush money days before the 2016 election.

Just a couple days ago Trump promised to pull American troops out of Syria completely. Then Syria gassed some more civilians. That made Trump's advisors nervous, because it looked like Trump was caving in to Putin and Assad.

Trump made a big show of hitting a Syrian base with missiles a year ago after Assad gassed civilians last April. But Trump had warned the Russians the attack was coming, so there was almost no damage: Israeli media reported that the base was operational the next day.

Syria has used gas on civilians nine times since the 2016 election, and Trump has taken no serious actions against the Syrian dictator.

But now, suddenly, Trump is about to take bold action. Why? Why now? Nothing in the Syrian Civil War is any different this time than it was the dozens of other times Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.

It appears all too likely that any attack Syria will just be an attempt to Wag the Dog and divert attention from the Cohen raid. Because if we're at war, it would be unpatriotic to investigate the president.

I can just hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that the investigations into wrongdoing by Trump and his cronies are aiding and abetting America's enemies abroad.

Those investigations include Russian election hacking, the conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign, large Russian contributions to the NRA and the Trump Foundation, numerous financial connections between Trump businesses and Russian oligarchs, financial connections between Trump cabinet members (like Wilbur Ross) and the Russians, secret backdoor negotiations between Trump proxies (like Eric Prince) and the Russians before Trump assumed office, several Trump flunkies who have already pleaded guilty to a wide variety of criminal activities surrounding the election and the early days of the Trump administration, as well as countless scandals about profligate spending and influence peddling by his cabinet members (Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson, Steven Mnuchin, etc., etc. ad nauseam). Not to mention Trump's history of sexual harassment and paying hush money to silence Playboy playmates and porn stars.

Nothing about the Syria problem today is any different than it was for the first 400 days of the Trump administration, yet Trump managed to spend more than a quarter of his days in office at one of his golf clubs. Now he suddenly can't go to South America?

We all know what Trump thinks about South America and all those "shithole/shithouse" countries, as he likes to call them. In all likelihood he was just looking for an excuse to avoid going down there and pretending to like those people.

What do you bet that by Friday everything will be calm enough that Trump will be able to spend the weekend at one of his golf resorts?

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