President Trump has a notorious habit of variously taking credit for successes he had little to do with and praising things, only to see them fail.
For example:
- He took credit for Ford’s decision to keep a manufacturing plant in Kentucky instead of moving it to Mexico. But then Ford announced that it never intended to move the plant in the first place.
- He took credit for Japanese company SoftBank’s decision to invest billions of dollars and create thousands of jobs in the United States. But then news reports revealed that SoftBank made that decision during the Obama administration – when everyone, including Trump, thought Hillary would be the next president.
- He took credit for gas prices being the lowest in 10 years last summer, when the national average was $2.23. But then that average started rising. It’s now at $2.92, and is bound to rise well above $3.00 this summer. Not to mention that, contrary to Trump’s claim, it fell well below $2.00 at points during Obama’s presidency.
- He praised the historic profitability of his casinos. But then they all went bankrupt.
- He praised the retention of manufacturing jobs at Carrier. But then Carried moved those jobs to Mexico.
- He praised the Republican-controlled Congress for repealing Obamacare. But then, Republican Senator John McCain killed that effort with his famous thumbs down.
Which brings me to this deadly confluence: He took credit in January for an unprecedented stretch of airline safety. But then the industry suffered an unprecedented spate of airline crashes.
Trump on Tuesday appeared to claim that his policies in his first year in the White House resulted in the commercial aviation industry posting its safest year ever in 2017 — though the U.S. had gone years without a U.S. commercial airline fatality before he took office.
‘Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,’ Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. ‘Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!’
(Politico, January 2, 2018)
Sure enough, to paraphrase the aphoristic title of Rick Wilson’s book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, everything Trump praises fails:
Almost 200 people have been killed in a spate of passenger plane crashes in the first three months of this year, after a fatality-free 2017 for commercial jets.
While it’s impossible to draw comparisons to any of the recent aviation accidents, questions have naturally resurfaced over air safety and why it’s been such a bad start to 2018 for flying.
(The National UAE, March 14, 2018)
And things only got worse after that, which included last week’s crash of a Boeing 737 soon after takeoff from Havana airport. The entire crew of 6 and 104 passengers died (3 survived).
But no less troubling was the catastrophic engine failure last month of another Boeing 737, soon after takeoff from Philadelphia airport. That resulted in a female passenger being sucked halfway out a broken window and later dying from her injuries.
And that came less than a week after the most disastrous airline crash in decades, namely, the April 11 crash of an Algerian airplane soon after takeoff from the Boufarik air base. The entire crew of 16 and 247 passengers died.
Granted, this last crash was not of a commercial airplane; it was not even an American one. But this only shows that the curse of Trump’s praise knows no bounds.
Incidentally, in Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson chronicles and derides the way the Republican Party, evangelical Christians, military generals, and a host of erstwhile respectable political operatives sacrificed their professional reputation and good name at the altar of Trump’s imperial ambitions.
But iPINIONS beat him to the punch in many commentaries, notably in “Evangelicals Supporting Trump like Israelites Worshipping Golden Calf,” January 20, 2016, and “Trump Sharing Classified Info with Russians Forces [General] McMaster to Spicer Himself,” May 16, 2017.
Frankly, never before in the history of politics have so many sacrificed so much for so little. And I cannot overstate the shock of so many evangelical Christians sacrificing their souls at the altar of this two-legged golden calf.
Related commentaries:
snubbing Trump…
Evangelicals supporting Trump…
Trump sharing classified info…
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