The nopes come in
Was Trump really telling a whopper when he said Obama told him he (Obama) was on the edge of war with North Korea? Peter Baker at the Times has collected some “Nope”s from people who worked in Obama’s administration.
President Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Mr. Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.
“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”
Well I was there and I say he didn’t. In fact I heard him not say it.
The notion that Mr. Obama, who famously equivocated about a single missile strike against non-nuclear Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons against its own civilians, would have started a full-fledged war with North Korea seems hard to imagine, to say the least. But this presumption has become part of Mr. Trump’s narrative in patting himself on the back for reaching out to North Korea to make peace.
For reaching out to North Korea to make peace or for calling Kim Little Rocket Man on Twitter or something like that.
Trump has been claiming that we would be in a war with North Korea right now if it weren’t for his miraculous election.
“And I can tell you, the previous administration would have been in war right now if that was extended. You would, right now, be in a nice, big, fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn’t elected president.”
It is impossible to prove a negative, of course, but nobody who worked for Mr. Obama has publicly endorsed this assessment, nor have any of the memoirs that have emerged from his administration disclosed any serious discussion of military action against North Korea. Several veterans of the Obama era made a point of publicly disputing Mr. Trump’s characterization on Friday.
“We were not on the brink of war with North Korea in 2016,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, wrote on Twitter.
John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director, told NBC News, “President Obama was never on the verge of starting any war with North Korea, large or small.”
Ok but who you gonna believe, some losers who worked for Obama or Jeenyus Don who saved us all by calling Kim names on Twitter?
Mr. Trump bases his argument on the single extended conversation he has ever had with Mr. Obama. In November 2016, Mr. Obama invited the man elected to succeed him to the White House for a 90-minute discussion of the issues awaiting him.
Mr. Trump’s account of that conversation has evolved over time. At first, he said that Mr. Obama told him that North Korea would be the new administration’s toughest foreign policy challenge, which seems plausible enough. Only later did Mr. Trump add the supposed war discussion.
After he made it up.
In an email on Friday, Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Obama did warn Mr. Trump about North Korea in their meeting, but hardly suggested that he was ready to use force. “He talked about the threat from North Korea’s program — where it stood, what our concerns were,” Mr. Rhodes said. “That’s very different from saying you’re about to go to war!”
Well, yes, to an adult mind it is, but Obama was talking to Trump, who doesn’t have an adult mind.
Jen Psaki, who was Mr. Obama’s White House communications director, likewise dismissed the notion that the departing president told his successor he had been ready to send in the bombers. “There is no scenario where I could see him saying that given he isn’t an alarmist and that is exactly what everyone has been trying to avoid forever,” she said.
Plus, he was talking to Trump.
I’ve always been slightly skeptical of the ur-woke invocation of the term ‘normalize’, either in its positive (demanding we normalize cultural diversity) or its negative (explaining why the assumptions of cultural hegemony seem normative) senses, but I can’t think of a single better term for the lockstep refusal of so many people to pretend that Trump isn’t who he so obviously is.