Donald Trump has been excoriated by the Washington Post and other leftist organs for saying that when it comes to President Obama’s weak and ineffectual anti-terrorism policy, “there’s something going on.” Something clearly is, not just with anti-terrorism policy, but with most of the administration’s foreign and national security policy.
Obama won’t utter the words radical Islamic terror (or similar locutions), as even Hillary Clinton has. Obama runs the perverse “Countering Violent Extremism” program. Obama has enormously enriched Iran, our worst and most threatening enemy among foreign states. Obama has cozied up to Cuba, our worst enemy in this Hemisphere, without obtaining any meaningful concessions. Obama has been belligerent towards Israel, our best friend in the Middle East.
Obama overthrew a Libyan government that had tried to align itself with the U.S. and he did nothing to stop that state’s descent into dangerous instability following the overthrow. Obama backed an unpopular Muslim Brotherhood controlled government in Egypt and was outraged when that government was overthrown and replaced by one sympathetic to the U.S. and its interests.
Other administrations might have adopted one or two of these policies. But Obama indulged in all of these oddities, and more.
Whatever arguments one might wish to make in support of these various actions and approaches, one must admit that they are not business as usual. Obama surely would agree. He is, after all, self-consciously “transformative.”
So Donald Trump is right; there’s something going on.
The Post’s editorial board interprets Trump’s statement to mean that Obama wants terrorists to attack the United States. But that’s not what Trump said or implied.
The closest he came to saying what’s going on was: “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or he’s got something else in mind.” That just about exhausts the possible explanations.
At Power Line, we’ve been trying to adjudicate among these explanations for the better part of seven years. I believe that what’s going on is all of the above, but mostly that Obama’s “got something else in mind.”
That something else isn’t a desire to see the U.S. terrorized. Rather, it’s deep ambivalence about our country that has produced a desire to see the U.S. become less powerful and less influential, at least in the traditional sense.
We can debate this subject for seven more years. What seems indisputable is that there’s something going on.
Ironically, Donald Trump, just about my least favorite Republican, is one of the few Republican politicians who grasps the magnitude of the Obama administration’s abnormality.
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