Trump blasts off 2018 with taunting tweets
WASHINGTON: You thought President Donald Trump might mellow out in 2018? Refrain from taunting world leaders tweet by tweet? Think again.
Trump is storming into the new year in exceptionally aggressive fashion, picking fresh fights on Twitter with such speed that his aides, international partners and the public are struggling to catch up. If he was brash in Year One, the first days of Year Two suggest he was just warming up.
Pakistan? Liars and swindlers who enable terrorists, the president tweeted hours after the world celebrated new year.
The Palestinians? No more US aid until they get their act together and agree to peace talks with Israel.
Iran? “Failing at every level,” Trump tweeted as he declared full-throated US support for protesters there opposing the government.
And North Korea? Leader Kim Jong Un may have a figurative “nuclear button” on his desk, but Trump’s is “much bigger” the president quipped, flippantly tossing off a threat to launch the world’s first nuclear strike in more than 70 years.
To Trump’s supporters, and even to his critics, it may seem business as usual.
Yet for foreign nations trying anxiously to interpret the US leader, such statements can have real-world consequences. Pakistan is livid at Trump’s remarks, summoning the US ambassador in Islamabad to explain the disparagement of a key US security partner. North Korea experts worry Trump’s taunting of Pyongyang could lead the two countries to stumble into war. “I think he should stop. It’s dangerous bravado,” former vice-president Joe Biden said. Trump needed to learn it’s not a game and “words matter” when uttered by the commander in chief.
The White House played down the furore. Spokesperson Sarah Sanders insisted Trump wasn’t “taunting” Kim Jong-un. What would be dangerous, Sanders said, would be for Trump to stay silent. “This is a president who is not going to cower down and is not going to be weak.”
On Wednesday, much of official Washington gasped as Trump, responding to a new book filled with criticism and insider gossip about his administration, issued a statement blasting his former chief strategist Steve Bannon as “out of his mind”.
“This is just who he is,” Ari Fleisher, former press secretary to President George W Bush, said of Trump. Trump’s social media taunts have left officials at the White House National Security Council, the State Department and other agencies scrambling to determine if he was setting new directions or giving New Year’s oomph to his pre-existing foreign policy. For the most part, it turned out to be the latter.