President Trump said something true — and "not so innocent" America objected

06 February 2017

Even when President Trump gets something right, he gets slammed

For instance, this weekend, the President indicated that the moral absolutism that reviles Russian President Putin is misplaced. It overlooks, he implied, the United States' own lethality:

The US president appeared to place the US and Russia on the same moral plane in an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl kicked off in Houston, Texas.

Asked by the host, Bill O’Reilly, if he respected Putin, Trump replied: “I do respect Putin.

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It’s very possible I won’t.”

O’Reilly said: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied.

“We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump's statement is difficult to challenge on factual grounds

But that seems not to have stopped the pushback against it. Matt Lewis, writing in The Daily Beast, was representative.

Mr. Lewis evidently assumes that American "exceptionalism" miraculously transcends the volume of harm that we leave in our wake:

Trump . . . . combines a traditional left-wing assumption that America is just as compromised as every other nation (maybe worse) with the transactional business ethos that puts profits ahead of people, ideas, and values.

Aside from his false assumption, it is obviously problematic to have a president whose worldview sees America as less than exceptional.

During times of crisis, the president should be able to inspire Americans to sacrifice and serve a cause greater than their own self-interest. When people believe that they are part of something special and exceptional, this belief binds them together and makes them stronger.

Inculcating a sense of self-righteous exceptionalism is what Adolf Hitler did with Nazi Germany

Fostering a sense of exceptionalism is clearly not enough to triumph over moral baseness.

Mr. Lewis then worsened this logical oversight by assuming the existence of American righteousness, rather than by proving it.

Proving our "better than Putin-ness" might be difficult

We Americans ignore how many innocents we kill or maim, while bringing our "we know better than you do" ethos to the rest of the world.

More than two years ago, former Army colonel (now Professor) Andrew Bacevich wrote that:

Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed . . . . And that’s just since 1980.

In 2016, President Obama bombed seven overwhelmingly Muslim nations — Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. And he authorized ten times more drone strikes during his presidency than liberals' favorite American villain, President George W. Bush, did.

Overall, the American record is a difficult one to base the claim of righteous non-killingness on.

The moral? — President Putin is, as President Trump indicated, not the only cold killer around

Pulling our blind heads out of our behinds might freshen the hypocritical stink of our actions. Though President Trump is too much and too little for my taste, he deserves "I'll consider that" credit for the occasionally true statements that he makes.

With regard to acknowledging that America occasionally kills like Putin's Russia, the American President is essentially acknowledging that — at least sometimes — "We have met the enemy and he is us."

This implication, whatever one thinks of President Trump, is (perhaps accidentally) insightful.

In these impoverished leadership times, we should treasure the rare Sanity that we come across.

PeteFree.com

President Trump said something true — and "not so innocent" America objected