–U.S. Economic Power Can Be ‘Much More Powerful … Than Playing With Guns’
By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – A new week, a Monday Cabinet meeting backgrounds another long recitation of familiar themes from President Trump, the stock market stays positive – and yet again, nothing seems quite the same.
As on Friday, this month’s key inflection point at the White House – toward a downward trajectory – still seems to overshadow the rest. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his Republican colleagues to prepare for a Senate impeachment trial that could last weeks, the context abruptly changed for everything else.
In the economic sphere this month, perhaps also an inflection point and in the positive direction based on the buoyancy of the stock markets – including the 0.7% bump up for the S&P Monday- and perhaps more important, what appears to be a barely detectable but authentic upwelling of world interest rates.
Plus there was an underlying optimism, perhaps fragile but distinct, among several finance ministers and central bank governors at last week’s IMF meeting and a sign that China’s leaders are determined to ignore the White House’s ups and downs to focus on certain specific medium-term goals.
“I don’t want to leave troops there. It’s very dangerous,” the president repeated about Syria at the morning Cabinet meeting where 50 people – Cabinet members and assorted administration officials – listened intently as the band of pool reporters listened and eventually asked questions. Again the unspoken question was what was the wider implication?
Anyone stuck in traffic along 15th street had to be impressed when those latecomers to the Cabinet meeting pressed their drivers to the wrong side of the road, pushing their shiny black SUVs to get in that E Street Ellipse entrance to the Executive Office compound before it was too late.
Those who admire President Trump for his sheer bravado, his pugnacity and even his purposeful divisiveness may not be inclined to fixate on the details of governance, the intricacies that preoccupy so many inside the Beltway whose careers depend on intricacies.
So when Trump declared the ceasefire in Syria is holding, reinforced by observers who say the Kurds are mostly withdrawing from their territory that Turkey intends to be occupy in the next few days, that for them may be enough to know about the subject.
That Trump again insisted he is bringing U.S. troops home, while his Pentagon chief said they are returning by way of Iraq, and more troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia and to a point near the Israel-Jordan border and to nearby the Syrian oil fields, for admirers that doesn’t rise to the level of a discrepancy
That Trump, again for most of that more-than-an hour Cabinet meeting, returned to the subjects of Hillary Clinton, of Barack Obama, to “Shifty Schiff,” the head of the House Intelligence Committee, and of so many other topics resurrected from last Wednesday’s Dallas rally, was for his admirers fresh red meat. It was all welcomed as a sign of admirable consistency and focus by the chief executive.
“It’s cost me between $2 billion and $5 billion” to be president, Trump said. “and if I had to do it again, I’d do it in an instant. Because who cares. If you can afford it what difference does it make? Because I’m making a big difference for the country.”
President Trump’s many adversaries might argue about the magnitude of those differences, whether, as he said again, the country is enjoying its best economy ever, whether the country “is stronger now than it’s been in many years – maybe ever.”
The crowds still cheer, he said, perhaps their loudest and most enthusiastically, as in Dallas, when he says he’s “bringing our soldiers home from endless wars.” Not only in Dallas and other pro-Trump bastions. In front of the White House Monday morning, amid the perpetual anti-Trump protests, an elderly black man proudly held a sign, “Build the Wall.”
That flip on holding the Group of Seven June summit at his own resort in Miami, means, he said, that wherever it is now held, it won’t be as spectacular. Choosing Trump National Doral was no different, he suggested, than “George Washington. He ran his business simultaneously while he was president.” Barack Obama signed a book contract while in office, he said. There were several stories that said it was Republican donors, candidates and incumbents who told him to nix Doral.
Yet through it all, Trump’s words and actions are being carefully weighed by another audience, apolitical, clinical, distributed among several sets within the U.S military and intelligence establishment and their counterparts in other capitals.
They also note the context, a president who appears to be en route to be only the third president impeached by the House of Representatives, to then undergo weeks of Senate trial testimony that will be heavily watched as the hours of TV coverage mount into the hundreds.
The words that stand out for them – and perhaps for an even wider audience –may be the president’s laments about those bodies of the fallen he sometimes witnesses returning two miles south of Dover, Delaware. At that Air Force base, he has said, the parents sometimes break through the lines of military guards to throw themselves on top of the coffins.
He has repeated how much that affects him several times, and again at Monday’s Cabinet meeting.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I want to bring our soldiers back home. If people want to leave them there, I’ll take that every day. All I know – you were in Dallas. All I know is the place went crazy when I said we’re bringing our soldiers back home.”
He continued, “They want our soldiers back home. I think we can do as well or better, frankly. They’ve got to keep going at each other. It’s artificial to have these soldiers walking up and down between two big countries.”.
The words that the president has repeated so often suggest a great reluctance to place U.S. troops in harm’s way. It raises the question how deep is that aversion, how willing is the U.S. to stand between warring factions in the role of international peacekeeper that Russia seems to be assuming in Syria.
Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on his way to visit Vladimir Putin Tuesday and between them they will likely be shaping the architecture of the border area and perhaps an area that extends beyond the border buffer zone. If the talks fail, Erdogan said he will implement his plans on his own.
“It would be much easier for me to let our soldier be there, let them continue to die,” Trump continued Monday. “I go out to Dover. I meet parents; It’s not a pleasant thing. It’s the most unpleasant thing I do.”
There was more to come, much more.
“When I see that big cargo plane open and I see those coffins get rolled off, Or when I go to Walter Reed hospital – where the doctors are incredible, by the way – saving people that could have never been saved even five years ago. Those people are horribly wounded – horribly, horribly wounded.”
And more, “For what? For what?,” Trump went on Monday. “There are times to fight. And there are times not to fight, there are times to be smart. We have tremendous economic power and we’re using our economic power, much more powerful in certain ways than playing with guns.
“And much better for our country, and much better for everybody and actually much better for humanity.
If what is evolving is a Trump Doctrine about when not to “play with guns” and when to fight, it may be engraved in history books much more indelibly than “Shifty Schiff” and so much else identified with this president. Or maybe it’s just a transitory riff, an applause line.
History seems to teach, however, that there are many players when it comes to guns, and many who are be willing to test where the U.S. draws the line – or if in some cases there is any longer a line.