Trump: ISIS “Gave Up” Because He’s President

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When I wrote yesterday about Donald Trump planning to take all the credit for the defeat of ISIS, I didn’t realize that he had been on the Chris Plante show a few hours earlier and had already done so:

President Donald Trump took credit for the fact that ISIS is in retreat during an interview Tuesday, claiming that ISIS wasn’t on the run before because “you didn’t have Trump as your president.”

….”ISIS is now giving up, they are giving up, there are raising their hands, they are walking off. Nobody has ever seen that before.”

When Plante asked why that hadn’t happened before, Trump took the bait. “Because you didn’t have Trump as your president,” he said. “It was a big difference, there was a big, big difference if you look at the military now.”

Trump did nothing. The plan to take both Mosul and Raqqa was initiated under Obama, and Trump famously refused to approve a new plan for months because the military kept telling him that Obama’s approach was working. So he put them off and put them off until he finally approved a plan in August that was mostly the same as the plan we already had. And now he’s claiming that this new plan turned things around in eight weeks.

I know we don’t expect anything else from Trump. But he can always be even worse than you think, can’t he? Hell, he didn’t even give the military any credit, let alone Obama. What a jackass.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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