Adam and Trump

 

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Trump confirms he wanted to assassinate Assad. In 2018, he denied it was even considered.

Aaron Blake, Washington Post (09/15/20)

President Trump devoted much of his “Fox and Friends” interview Tuesday morning to deriding his perceived foes and, in particular, to combating Bob Woodward’s new book.

But even as he called into question the book’s credibility, he reinforced his own lack thereof — and all you have to do is compare what he said Tuesday to the last time Woodward published a book.

In the Fox interview, Trump derided former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who has in recent months warned the country strongly against reelecting Trump. But in the course of making that case, Trump offered an odd claim: He said Mattis had effectively stood in the way of his efforts to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“I would’ve rather taken him out,” Trump said. “I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.”

When asked whether he regretted not taking Assad out, Trump added: “No, I don’t regret that. … I had a shot to take him out if I wanted. Mattis was against it.”

The first problem with this argument is that Trump is denigrating Mattis for opposing something that Trump doesn’t even say he regrets. The second is that the commander in chief makes these decisions, full stop. If Trump wanted to do it, Mattis couldn’t stop him. The fact that Mattis expressed opposition to a plan that Trump even today doesn’t necessarily advocate today may not be the best example of him being a bad public servant.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that, in the course of making this strange argument, Trump directly contradicted himself. And the contradiction dates back, as it happens, to the last time Woodward published a book about him.

In 2018, Woodward published “Fear.” In the book, he reported that Trump had considered assassinating Assad. And Trump, on Sept. 5, 2018, flatly denied it.

“I heard somewhere where they said the assassination of President Assad by the United States. Never even discussed,” Trump said, adding: “No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated.”

He even held it up as evidence that the book shouldn’t have been published.

“It should not have been written about in the book,” Trump said. “It’s just more fiction. The book is total fiction. Okay?”

Trump is now confirming what he claims was “fiction” was actually very accurate. But as is often the case with Trump, it’s still not clear what the truth is.

Trump in 2018, after all, wasn’t the only one offering something amounting to a denial. So too did then-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.

“I have the pleasure of being privy to those conversations … and I have not once heard the president talk about assassinating Assad,” Ms Haley said at the time.

The White House had good reason to deny such plans in 2018: Even planning such an operation as a contingency would be highly controversial, given its impact in a volatile region. But after all that went into denying it, we just needed Woodward to publish another book for Trump to give an entirely different version of events.

And it sure undermines Trump’s efforts to cast Woodward as the one who can’t be trusted.