Wednesday night’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum,” presented by NBC News and MSNBC, was a debacle. Every network that’s hosting a presidential debate in the next seven weeks should study the video to learn how not to interrogate Donald Trump. But Trump still managed, through boastful indifference, to reveal the most important thing about his presidency: He would make the United States an authoritarian country.
Trump played his usual tricks. When he was quizzed about foreign policy, he changed the subject to trade. When he was pressed for solutions, he talked instead about President Obama’s failures. When he was asked about a tweet in which he had blamed military sexual assaults on the integration of women, he acted as though he had always believed the problem was insufficient prosecution. He also claimed, contrary to fact—and undisputed by moderator Matt Lauer—that he had been “totally against the war in Iraq.”
...Trump claimed that in the classified intelligence briefing he received on Aug. 17, he learned “that our leadership, Barack Obama, did not follow what our experts” had recommended “in almost every instance.” That’s quite a claim, since the briefing was prepared by James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence. The session was classified, so Clapper and his briefers can’t rebut Trump in public. This tells you how Trump would treat classified information as president: He would lie about it for political gain and dare the intelligence community to violate the law by exposing him.
...When Lauer asked him how we would take Iraq’s oil, Trump replied: “You would leave a certain group behind, and you would take various sections where they have the oil.” We got “nothing” for the money we spent invading Iraq, Trump complained. “It used to be, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ … I always said, ‘Take the oil.’ ”
This is a policy of explicit theft. Trump has stated this policy many times. He has been applauded for it by crowds and has not been morally challenged by Lauer or other interviewers. Now Trump is repeating it in the run-up to the fall debates. He’s betting that Americans will embrace—and the media will accept—plunder as foreign policy. So far, he has not been proved wrong.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...n_chief_forum_was_an_authoritarian_farce.html
Trump played his usual tricks. When he was quizzed about foreign policy, he changed the subject to trade. When he was pressed for solutions, he talked instead about President Obama’s failures. When he was asked about a tweet in which he had blamed military sexual assaults on the integration of women, he acted as though he had always believed the problem was insufficient prosecution. He also claimed, contrary to fact—and undisputed by moderator Matt Lauer—that he had been “totally against the war in Iraq.”
...Trump claimed that in the classified intelligence briefing he received on Aug. 17, he learned “that our leadership, Barack Obama, did not follow what our experts” had recommended “in almost every instance.” That’s quite a claim, since the briefing was prepared by James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence. The session was classified, so Clapper and his briefers can’t rebut Trump in public. This tells you how Trump would treat classified information as president: He would lie about it for political gain and dare the intelligence community to violate the law by exposing him.
...When Lauer asked him how we would take Iraq’s oil, Trump replied: “You would leave a certain group behind, and you would take various sections where they have the oil.” We got “nothing” for the money we spent invading Iraq, Trump complained. “It used to be, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ … I always said, ‘Take the oil.’ ”
This is a policy of explicit theft. Trump has stated this policy many times. He has been applauded for it by crowds and has not been morally challenged by Lauer or other interviewers. Now Trump is repeating it in the run-up to the fall debates. He’s betting that Americans will embrace—and the media will accept—plunder as foreign policy. So far, he has not been proved wrong.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...n_chief_forum_was_an_authoritarian_farce.html
