But nah
Not wild, probably not even false. Let’s see the details on this of course, but Pakistan sorta/kinda knew where Osama was. Had to go fish but they didn’t warn Pakistan about the raid because Panetta thought Osama would get a heads up.
https://twitter.com/dburbach/status/1188076496570798081?s=19
This guy is a professor of International Relations & National Security at the Naval War College.
only heard of this isis dude once so it’s definitely not gonna make much of an impact out there.
In the minds of his base, this all is no more true today than it was yesterday. We can’t really worry about the immutable and indoctrinated.
If it is true we captured/killed Al-Baghdadi…which I didn’t know his name before today either. Trump will be tweeting every fucking single day about how this is proof he has single handedly destroyed ISIS, even if he had been tweeting he single handedly destroyed ISIS before this.
This talking point is dead. We should never bring it up again, it’s a loser. Logic doesn’t matter.
Sure, he’s basically the political equivalent of Jamie Gold on a sick heater, but to the vast majority of Americans, results are all that matters. They aren’t smart enough to know that he dumped all of his chips off like a clueless buffoon, got it all in as a 70/30 underdog and drilled the river… They just know he got the win. So what if he pulled all the troops out? He got the top ISIS guy! So what if he screwed the Kurds? America First!
When he brags about this, the proper play from now on will be just to pivot. “Yeah, whatever. What’s that going to do for Americans on healthcare? What’s that going to do for the poor and middle class’s wages?”
What percentage of Americans care about the ethnic cleansing? Not enough to matter in 2020. This signature achievement will be remembered because he’ll tweet about it five times a day every day, and the media will cover it. And too many Dems will take the bait and argue about how he luckboxed his way into it with horrible foreign policy, but nobody gives a shit. That’s too nuanced, so he wins.
If he wants to keep this in the forefront, and he obviously does, it’ll be trivially easy to do so.
It’s obviously nowhere near as big of a deal as getting bin Laden, but wait until the right wing media spins it for a while. The narrative is going to be: Trump defeated ISIS, Trump brought the troops home, Trump killed the head of ISIS, there have been no foreign terror attacks on the homeland. Obama got us mired in a mess, Trump bailed us out. The real terrorists now are Antifa, and they’re coming to kill you all, only Trump can stop them. Give him four more years and he’ll defeat Antifa, too.
I guarantee you, there will even be some jackass on the right on Fox News claiming that Obama didn’t even get Bin Laden, it was actually Bush and Obama just took all the credit. CNN will be running segments with debate panels discussing whether this makes it tougher to impeach him.
We cannot win on this narrative, we can only avoid it and minimize it. Dems won’t be smart enough to do that, they’ll self-own repeatedly. They’ll even walk into the most basic of traps and get slapped around by stuff like, “My goodness, how could any American root AGAINST the president when it comes to killing the leader of ISIS??? Surely we all must agree this is a great success. How radical are you guys if you’re rooting against our heroic president on this???” Then they’ll agree, and fuck it up even worse.
Meanwhile the deplorables who just needed something to hang their hat on to justify their 2020 vote now have it. He solved terrorism and fixed the middle east. Four more years! Can’t call 'em racists, they’re just voting for safety from terrorism!
This is very bad news for 2020. Warren and Bernie will handle it well, Pelosi and Schumer will fuck it all up, the talking heads will make a mess of it. Biden will probably trip over himself to compliment Trump on this and relate it to Obama getting Bin Laden to try to brag about how he was there for that, but he’ll then accidentally be validating the false equivalency.
I’m surprised people have never heard of him before. He was captured back w/ Bush was Prez and let go for whatever reason. He then became leader of ISIS. It’s a pretty big deal but I’m sure Trump is gonna fuck it up like he fucks everything else up. If anything, it’s probably gonna remind people of how fucking inept W was. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump’s the one that reminds everyone that he was let go when Bush was POTUS LOL.
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Under a normal president, yea. But Trump isn’t normal. He will fuck this up. He always does.
I mean, there is absolutely no way al-Baghdadi fell into Trump’s lap like this. A night before he’s about to make a national appearance at a World Series game? In the midst of impeachment hearings? Someone offered the ISIS dude up. It’s only a matter of time before that leaks. I give it 6 months.
He’s already fucking it up by having a 9 AM press conference on a Sunday morning. 3/4 of the country will be either asleep or at church.
It’s good news that al Baghdad’s had been killed despite of Trump’s chaos policy in Syria. In terms of messaging, I would simply ignore Trump and praise the military for its efforts.
Oh man, the whole “the oil is safe” thing makes soooooooooo much more sense now.
I’d be shocked if this moves the needle on anything. Comparing this to bin Laden is LOL ridiculous. No one knows who this dude is or cares.
It’s a win for Trump but it’s short term. It’s not like you can go into debates being like “yo remember when I merked al-Baghdadi” the way you could have with bin Laden.
Yeah, it’s a small win in the face of overwhelming defeat.
It won’t be enough to stave off impeachment, it won’t last a scaramucci in the minds of voters outside of his cult. We are still exactly at the point we were before it happened with him likely to be acquitted in the Senate, the only thing it changes is his rhetoric.
“How dare the do nothing Dems impeach the savior that killed… that ISIS guy what’s his name, um, Ali Baba, yeah, and we would have killed his 100 theives too if those meddling kids hadn’t gotten in the way!”
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One pentagon official likened it to giving a baby their medicine in applesauce. This is how people negotiate with Trump.
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Is there a chance Trump goes down over this or not?