[ad_1]
FOur days before ordering a drone strike on Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani, Donald Trump was debating the murder on his own Florida golf course, according to Bob Woodward’s new book on the fickle president.
Trump’s golf partner that day was Senator Lindsey Graham, who had emerged as one of his closest advisers, and who urged him not to take a “giant step”, which could trigger “near-total war.”
Graham warned Trump that he would increase the stakes from “playing $ 10 blackjack to $ 10,000 per hand blackjack.”
“This is exaggerated,” said the senator. “How about hitting someone a notch below Suleimani, which would be so much easier for everyone to absorb?”
Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mick Mulvaney, also begged Graham to help him change Trump’s mind.
Trump was not persuaded, pointing to the Iranian-orchestrated attacks on American soldiers in Iraq, which he said were planned by the Iranian general, the leader of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Suleimani was assassinated in Baghdad on January 3, prompting a retaliatory Iranian missile strike on a US base in Iraq, but so far it is not the full-scale conflict that Graham and others warned the president about.
The golf course swap is described in an upcoming book, Rage, a second volume on the Trump presidency of Woodward, a veteran investigative reporter famous for covering the Watergate affair and the ensuing downfall of a scandal-plagued former president. , Richard Nixon.
Woodward interviewed Trump 18 times for the book and spoke extensively with Graham, as well as many presidential aides.
The portrait that emerges is familiar now: a volatile president, easily swayed by authoritarian leaders, and capable of swinging dramatically from fiery bellicose to flattering America’s most ardent adversaries.
Nowhere was that lash more violent than in North Korean policy. The book chronicles the period between July and November 2017 when Pyongyang tested a succession of long-range missiles capable of hitting the continental United States and conducted its sixth underground nuclear test.
Aware that the next missile could head toward the United States, and that decisions would have to be made in minutes that could put the country on the path to nuclear war, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis went to sleep in his clothes. gym and have a flashing light and hood installed in your bathroom in case a missile alert occurred when you were in the shower.
He also spent more time praying at the Washington National Cathedral and preparing for the worst. In the US command system, the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, but Mattis believes his recommendations will be asked.
“What do you do if you have to?” Mattis asked Woodward. “You are going to incinerate a couple million people. Nobody has the right to kill a million people, as far as I’m concerned. However, that’s what I have to face. “
Mattis’ fears were compounded by angry Trump tweets threatening destruction and “fire and fury” against North Korea.
Mattis called the tweets “unproductive, childish and dangerous” and pleaded with Trump to stop.
“I stopped enjoying public humiliation in the second degree,” he told the president, without success.
Ultimately, a conflagration was averted, and in early 2018 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared that the goal of developing a nuclear arsenal had been achieved and that it would therefore turn to focus on the economy.
Trump also changed direction and made peace proposals with Kim Jong-un, leading to a series of spectacular but ultimately ineffective summits, and a remarkable wave of 27 warm, sometimes loving letters between the two leaders, that Woodward has published for the first time. hour.
In December 2018, Kim recalled his first summit 200 days earlier in Singapore.
“Even now I cannot forget that moment in history when I firmly held His Excellency’s hand in that beautiful and sacred place while the whole world watched,” the North Korean leader wrote. Woodward noted that Trump was excited by the use of the title “Excellence.”
The president of the United States described the letters as “love letters” and told Kim that they had “a unique style and a special friendship.” After the scare of 2017, the president insisted that flattery was essential to avoid disaster.
“You can’t make fun of Kim,” he warned Woodward. “I don’t want to get into a fucking nuclear war because you made fun of him.”
US intelligence never found out who had produced Kim’s purple English prose, but Woodward wrote: “Analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to find the exact mix of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history. “
Manipulation of Trump by foreign potentates is a recurring theme of the book. Despite the fact that the special counsel’s investigation into Russia found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, the US director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, became convinced that Vladimir Putin “had something with Trump.”
“How else to explain the behavior of the president? Coats saw no other explanation, ”Woodward wrote after interviewing the former spy chief. “I was sure that Trump had chosen to play on the dark side – the wealthy interests in New York’s real estate culture and international finance with their corrupt deals to do anything to make money.”
Trump freely admits his affinity for foreign strongmen to Woodward.
“It’s funny the relationships I have,” he told the reporter. “The tougher and worse they are, the better I get along with them … Explain it to me some day.
Another example is the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, implicated by US intelligence in the murder and dismemberment of a US-based Saudi dissident and writer, Jamal Khashoggi, in October 2018. Trump declined to put his assessment of his own heads of intelligence and Congress. outrage at the prince’s protests of innocence.
“I saved his ass,” Trump is said to have said. “I got Congress to leave him alone. I was able to make them stop. “
Woodward repeatedly asked Trump if he believed in Prince Mohammed’s innocence. The president only replied that he “says very strongly that he did not” and, when pushed further, he diverted the conversation to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
In another extraordinary scene, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson describes joining a meeting between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2017 in Jerusalem, in which the Israeli leader showed the US president a video allegedly showing Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, inciting violence against Jews.
Tillerson believed the tape had been faked or tampered with, putting words and sentences together out of context, but Trump, who had previously distrusted Netanyahu, was fully convinced. The next day in Bethlehem, Trump insulted Abbas, calling him a liar and a murderer, and shortly thereafter severed diplomatic relations and financial support for the Palestinians.
Tillerson concluded that “Netanyahu had manufactured the tape to counteract any emerging pro-Palestinian sentiment.”
The president also expressed pride in his relationship with Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who in October 2019 persuaded Trump to announce a troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, abandoning the United States’ Kurdish allies, who had taken over. the initiative in the fight against Isis.
The decision was the last straw for an outraged Mattis.
“When they basically ordered me to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to stupid felony, strategically endangering our place in the world and everything in between. That’s when I resigned, “said the former defense secretary.
Mattis predicted that Trump’s impact on the country would be long-lasting.
“This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. The truth no longer governs the statements of the White House, “he said.
Coats, the former intelligence director, fired in July 2019 while playing golf at one of Trump’s courses, came to a similar conclusion.
“For him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what you think, ”Coats said. “He does not know the difference between the truth and the lie.”
