February 28, 2017

If Obama Had Said What Trump Just Said, the GOP Would Have Impeached Him


Appearing on Fox & Friends Tuesday, President Trump appeared to put the blame for Navy SEAL William Ryan Owens’ death in a raid in Yemen a few weeks ago squarely on the shoulders of the military.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do,” he said. “They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”

Imagine if Obama had said this about a soldier’s death; the GOP would have impeached him.

To be fair, the transcript of the “they lost Ryan” moment reads worse than the video plays.

It seems to me, saying “they lost Ryan” basically means “the mission went south,” and Trump is just a super clumsy speaker.

But the other part of his statement, where Trump says it is something “they” wanted to do and that it had been in planning since before his inauguration, is completely indefensible since he is the president, and in fact he agreed to do the mission.

Trump went on to say;

“I can understand people saying that. I’d feel ? ‘What’s worse?’ There’s nothing worse. This was something that they were looking at for a long time doing, and according to [Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information.”

According to NBC News, the mission produced no significant intelligence gains.

 

 

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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