He said he said
The Beeb has more on Trump’s interventions:
During remarks to a crowd of supporters, Mr Trump said Israel had to “straighten it out because they’re fighting, potentially a very big force”.
He called Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk” and repeatedly called Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group in Lebanon, “very smart”.
Mr Trump also said that Israel had initially agreed to work with the US on a 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, but that they backed out at the last minute.
“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” he said. “That was a very terrible thing.”
That “Bibi” crap is so grating. He wants to remind us that he knows Netanyahu personally. Just leave it at home, Don.
Mr Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, noted a pattern in his old boss’s foreign policy statements.
“Hezbollah aren’t smart, they’re evil,” he said in a radio interview on Thursday.
“But the former president also said when Russia invaded Ukraine in a similar, unprovoked, unconscionable invasion a year-and-a-half ago, he said Vladimir Putin was a genius.”
Well they can of course be both. Trump himself is “smart” in the sense of “good at committing crimes with impunity.” But in the case of Hezbollah and Trump, how “smart” they are is irrelevant to how profoundly evil they are.
It would be fine to discuss how intelligent a particular deplorable group is, of course, so long as you actually make it clear that they are, in fact, deplorable. First off, though, you’d need a vocabulary larger than 50 words, because ‘cunning’ is, generally, the preferred term for someone using their intelligence to an evil end.
In Trump’s case, of course, this is just more strong-man envy; he wishes he had these monsters’ ability to gain and retain power, unlike his “lose the popular vote but squeak out an electoral win, then get a full-blown loss”.
It’s possible that the Israelis backed out because there’d have been a huge risk of Trump blabbing about it to all and sundry just to show off, having first “declassified in his mind” all of the sensitive operational details. To him, that was one of the perks of being Prezident. “Look what I know!”