Once upon a time...
Republicans were the kings of dancing in the end zone...
and using national tragedies as political tools...
Then a Democrat delivered this...
and now all Republicans can deliver is this...
No wonder they're upset...
They have nothing else.
PRAISING HIMSELF FOR ISIS RAID, TRUMP UNDERMINES HIS OWN VICTORY
A rambling presser announcing the demise of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi saw Trump bowing to Russia, taking shots at Obama and generally squandering any bipartisan goodwill.
The fastest way to burn political capital after a military victory, it seems, is to have Donald Trump announce it. The president spent Sunday morning gleefully recounting the gory details of a U.S. Special Forces raid in Syria that claimed the life of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—indulging many of his own worst impulses in the process.
With the House impeachment inquiry
deepening and his polling
underwater, Trump seemed especially eager to reset the news cycle in his favor. But as usual, he found ways to undermine what might have been a unifying moment. Perhaps most egregious, he made a point of boasting that the death of Baghdadi was
more significant than the 2011 raid that killed 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden, as overseen by former president Barack Obama. “This is the biggest one perhaps that we’ve ever captured,” Trump said during the Q&A portion of his conference. “This is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country.”
Others took offense at Trump’s seemingly first-person account of the raid, which included vivid descriptions of U.S. helicopters entering Syrian airspace and ground forces “blowing a hole through the wall” of Baghdadi’s compound, as if Trump were leading the charge himself. It was “as though you were watching a movie,” Trump gushed of the Situation Room, where he huddled with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The White House even helpfully staged a photo of the event, recalling a similar historic image of Obama watching the bin Laden raid.
Only Trump was actually golfing at the time it happened.