We have all seen President Trump speaking off the cuff, rambling, and saying some pretty foolish things. Usually these embarrassing and cringe-worthy comments are a result of Trump impulsively firing off the first thing that pops into his head.
While most of these kinds of comments are hardly presidential, at least they can be attributed to a lack of discipline or a thin skin. We can comfort ourselves somewhat by excusing them as the product of a mercurial personality, one that has no ability to turn off its impulses.
But when a president delivers a speech at a joint press conference with a visiting head of state one would think that there would be some degree of thoughtfulness and preparation before delivering the speech.
Evidently, this was not the case this week when Trump held a joint press conference with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. In prepared remarks, Trump praised Lebanon for its fight against extremism, singling out ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, though, holds 12 seats in the Lebanese parliament and has been working with the Lebanese army to drive ISIS and al-Qaeda out of the area along the Syrian-Lebanese border. At least when it comes to battling the extremism of ISIS and al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are on the same page. To lump Hezbollah into the same category as ISIS and al-Qaeda displays a total lack of understanding of the political situation in Lebanon.
Which leads one to the question of how Trump’s speechwriter and his advisors would not have known this. How do you send the president you work for out to a press conference with a speech so nonsensical? Even an eighth-grader would have at least Googled “Lebanon” before handing in a paper to his social studies teacher, yet Trump’s speechwriter writes a speech without even a cursory understanding of Lebanon’s politics and Hezbollah’s ongoing fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda in northeastern Lebanon.
We’ve all had bad days at work before, but how does something like this happen? Of course, politicians always want to frame issues in a way that is most persuasive to their point of view, but the argument has to be somewhat plausible. It can’t be nonsense or contrary to obvious facts.
President Bush’s famous “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, where he claimed Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire “significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” was effective in persuading the country to invade Iraq because the claim was not immediately disprovable. Most Americans, even news reporters covering the Middle East, believed the claim was plausible, perhaps even likely. And so off to war we went, with most of the American media cheerleading us into a war that has turned into a fifteen-year quagmire.
So the next time Trump’s speechwriter sits down at his keyboard to hammer out a speech for his boss, he should at least do a few minutes of research and learn a little bit about the subject he is writing about. Otherwise, he will be making his boss look like a clueless buffoon, just as he did this week with the Lebanese prime minister.
