Dear America,
This is why we have to get Donald Trump out of office.
Last week, a Saudi air force trainee at an American airbase in Florida somehow managed to get a gun onto the base despite the prohibition against doing so. He shot and killed three people in cold blood it seems.
In December 2015, an American citizen of Pakistani descent brought his pregnant wife from Pakistan through Saudi Arabia. She was in Saudi Arabia for about a year while she was vetted to qualify for a green card allowing entry into the United States, which was approved at the end of that year, and she came here to be with her husband in San Bernardino. Her husband was an employee of the county health service. Shortly after arrival, she and her husband took guns to the husband's workplace, where a Christmas party was taking place and opened fire. They killed 14 people and wounded 22 others.
Osama Bin Ladin was a Saudi and his family are major figures in the construction business in Saudi Arabia.
But despite the fact that Saudi's have been involved so frequently with terrorism, Saudi Arabia is not on the Trump Muslim exclusion list. Neither is Pakistan, which allows terrorists to shelter in Pakistan just over its border with Afghanistan. The question all this begs is whether Trump is just dimwitted or is there something in his failure to include those two countries for exclusion? Is he the dotard that Kim Jong-un says he is or is there some corrupt connection between Trump and these countries? And then there are his feelings of affiliation for certain world leaders who's best practices we condemn in other places.
Trump continues to take the part of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the leader in fact of the country, despite his murder of a former Saudi journalist in Istanbul's Saudi embassy under Salman's aegis. And Trump refers to R.T. Erdogan as his "good friend" despite Erdogan's acts in Syria against the Kurds and his repressive governance of Turkey. And of course there is Kim Jong-un himself, with whom Trump has been claiming to have a cordial relationship and exchange of correspondence since the Trump overtures to Kim...overtures that seem never to have been anything but a barely post-pubescent dictator's outmaneuvering of our illustrious president. Finally there is Vladimir Putin. Trump has taken Putin's side against his own intelligence community's conclusion that Putin personally ordered and oversaw Russian interference in our election of 2016, which Trump won by the slenderest of margins in the electoral college and lost in the popular election. Could Trump's attitude toward Putin be gratitude for Russia producing just enough votes in just the right places to give Trump his dubious victory?
It's not the specifics of all these things...and too many others to mention...that are the ultimate concern. What is more daunting is the frequency, and even eagerness, with which he dives into these relationships that are inimical to American security and adverse to American values. I often find myself wondering if he is stupid or gullible. Is he nefarious or hapless. Is he a threat like Putin, or a threat like Yeltsin. Is he a fool or an evil conniver.
As I often tell my kids when they contemplate doing risky things, whether the rock hits the melon or the melon hit's the rock, it's bad for the melon. We're the melon in this scenario.
Your friend,
Mike
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