It Ain't That Bad

Our present preoccupation with living the Boy Who Cried Wolf’s life forces me to write the same column every so often. This week’s column is brought to you courtesy of revelations about President Trump’s secret plane swap forced by an Iranian threat.

To be sure, the whole ordeal is newsworthy. The “leader of the free world” being forced to not only abandon his ill-advised Qatari-gifted Air Force One, but also to board the older one only to deplane through a cargo passage onto a catering vehicle —- that feels like a movie plot and decidedly something we hope isn’t regularly necessary.

I expected critics to rightly point out the president’s foolishness in arranging a country that is, at best, a frenemy to give him a plane to begin with. It’d also be fair to note that if Trump is trying to out “Mission Accomplished” Dubya, he is succeeding in that challenge. It’s hard to declare genuine victory when your “defeated” adversary can force you to switch out of the most secure plane in the world as if one were so much lasagna being transferred.

What I didn’t really anticipate was that the critics would find themselves tied up in knots over the audacity of allowing Air Force One, still loaded with the press, to fly after the president was removed. Oh, the humanity!

What was the Secret Service supposed to do? Tell a group of people generally known for their dislike of POTUS and who are rather loose with their lips, “We understand there is a threat to the president, so we’re sending him out through the cargo hold and sneaking him onto another plane because Iran is actively trying to target him, pretty please don’t tell anyone”?

That’s absurd.

It’s not as if not-quite-Air-Force-One became a sitting duck. The Air Force protects it as it flies. If you were to crunch the numbers, I dare say those on Air Force One were probably still safer flying on it than if they too had disembarked and found their way to civilian flights. Iran is not the sort of country that only targets military vehicles after all.

But it’s more than that. This has been done before. On Leland Vittert’s On Balance last night, Bill Sammon recounted the same experience playing out when he was in the White House Press Corps during the Clinton Administration. He also relayed the story more fully at NewsNation’s sister outlet, The Hill.

Sammon, it should be noted, was commenting on a NewsNation program and not, say, Hannity over on the much larger Fox largely because of the president; he received Trump’s ire for quickly and correctly calling the 2020 election and was rewarded for his journalistic work with a tour of the exit door. But as a genuine reporter, he still made the point defending the move for a guy he’d understandably have a personal grudge against.

And so it has been repeatedly over and over again with every “OH NO, THE PRESIDENT IS ENDING THE WORLD” proclamation. Remember when DOGE was the ushering in of a new era of global fascism for having the audacity of chasing down wasteful government spending? (Never mind that the Clinton administration had laudably done the same thing?)

Or what about when, in his first administration, the critics insisted the president was going to usher in large scale anti-semitism, when everything (including his partially Jewish family) indicated this would not be the case? That critique, oddly enough, has faded as Democrats regularly nominate overt anti-semites like the New York mayor, but at one point you’d have thought Trump had a portrait of Adolf himself in the Oval.

Let’s be frank: at this point, I think we can say President Trump is doing a very good job of securing his place in the pantheon of the worst presidents. Even his right ideas —- like forcibly stopping Iran after it spent nearly a half century preparing to annihilate us by any means it could come up with —- are executed in such poorly planned ways that they seem inevitably destined to make things worse, not better.

History may not look kindly on Bush’s excursions to eliminate the “Axis of Evil,” but at least he seemed clear eyed on who they were and what needed to be done. Trump does not, even when Putin and the Ayatollah and their allies are all but dancing around in Team Evil shirts.

The lack of clarity means even his best international efforts are undercut by his own admiration of people who intend nothing good for him or us.

But our ability to rightly react to this is weakened by Trump’s critics. Just as the president’s affection for, say, Vladimir Putin, leads him to miss helpful allies and make strategic blunders, so too critics’ inability to ever admit when the President does something normal means there’s just too much noise to allow many reasonable people to hear when the criticism is spot on.

Instead of a few very clear, very terrible choices dominating headlines and —- perhaps —- even providing cover for saner heads (who are not retiring) in the GOP to distance themselves from Trump, the constant barrage encourages wagon circling.

The result is that on the one hand, people who are rightly or wrongly panicking run straight into the arms of even worse groups, like the Democratic Socialists of America. Meanwhile, on the other, many otherwise reasonable people defend the indefensible to provide cover for Trump’s worst impulses.

If, and only if, the sane critics can back down and admit when it ain’t that bad, perhaps we could confront this. Meanwhile, those saying they are trying to stop the president’s errors are really just committing their own by hiding the real errors in a sea of sound and fury.

It’s worth remembering that it didn’t work out well for the boy. It did for the wolf.