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While the world anxiously awaits the upshot from today’s Iranian ballistic missile strike against Israel, this much is certain: the next president of the United States will likely face a foreign policy crisis of existential proportions.
So now is the time for pondering, or pondering anew, the question, “Whose finger do we want on the nuclear trigger?”
The answer, like the question, is simple. It’s not Donald Trump.
Trump is demonstrably erratic, irrational and unstable, if not unhinged – traits hardly reassuring in an Oval Office occupant even in times of peace and prosperity.
In his book, The Room Where It Happened, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.” In an interview with ABC News, Bolton said that Trump was “stunningly uninformed,” which made him an easy mark for foreign foes.
“Trump’s Middle East track record,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin long before the current crisis erupted, included “his reckless decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal with no viable alternative, his contempt for any legitimate Palestinian aspirations and his desire to expand his Muslim travel ban to Gaza residents.”
Not surprisingly, in the wake of the missile attack Trump offered no proposals for heading off what might become an all-out war in the Middle East. Instead, he blamed it on the Biden administration.
Trump issued “a rambling, apocalyptic statement in which he declared the world ‘on fire and spiraling out of control,’” wrote The Independent’s Justin Rohrlich. “‘We have no leadership, no one running the country,’ the former president posted, disingenuously, on his flagging Twitter clone, Truth Social.”
Instead, Trump charged, “We have a non-existent President in Joe Biden, and a completely absent Vice President, Kamala Harris, who is too busy fundraising in San Francisco, a City which she and Gavin Newscum totally destroyed, and staging fake photo ops.”
“‘No one is in charge and it’s not even clear who is more confused: Biden or Kamala. Neither has any idea what is even going on.”‘
Rohrlich wrote, “Trump went on, claiming, untruthfully, that when he was in office, ‘Iran was in total check.’”
This afternoon, the Trump campaign put out an ad blaming Harris for the strike. Harris "unequivocally" blamed Iran for the missile barrage.
ABC News reported that the president and vice president “monitored the Iranian attack against Israel from the White House Situation Room and received regular updates from their national security team.”
The network’s John Parkinson, Anne Flaherty, Allison Pecorin and Cheyenne Haslett wrote that “the president had directed the U.S. military to aid Israel’s defense against Iranian attacks and to help shoot down missiles targeting Israel,” adding that “earlier, before the strike began, Biden had posted on X that the U.S. was ready to help Israel defend against the Iranian missile attack.”
The president, according to the four journalists, also pledged “that the U.S. was ready to protect American personnel in the region.”
No doubt, the missile attack will come up in tonight’s vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s pick for his understudy.
You can bet Vance, who has proven to be as deranged and detached from reality as Trump, will skip the policy proposals and parrot the boss’s Biden-did-it bilge. If the 78-year-old Trump wins, Vance will be the one a heartbeat away from the nuclear trigger.
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