In case you were wondering, it’s a new decade, but there’s apparently still not a boundary on what the Trumps are ready and willing to grossly politicize. This Wednesday morning, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted pompously about his father’s administration’s response to a group of demonstrators breaching the U.S. Embassy in Iraq the previous day. At least some of those demonstrators were apparently members of a terrorist militia that had been targeted in airstrikes around the Middle East over the weekend, and the U.S. responded with an immediate deployment of 750 troops. Trump Jr. apparently couldn’t resist turning the grave situation into an occasion to baselessly mock Obama.
Trump Jr., who supposedly has a family business to run, claimed that the Trump admin’s response was better than the Obama response to security threats at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, where in 2012, the then-ambassador and others were killed in an attack. In reality, the current troop deployment Trump Jr. is talking about came after the initial incident, just like responses to the Benghazi violence — but he doesn’t seem to care about making his comparison actually work.
He tweeted:
‘It’s nice to wake up in a country who once again leads like they should. When our embassy’s is under attack & they ask for help they actually get it… Immediately! Yesterday’s action vs the disgraceful response at Benghazi is all you need to know about leadership then & now!’
It’s nice to wake up in a country who once again leads like they should. When our embassy’s is under attack & they ask for help they actually get it… Immediately!
Yesterday’s action vs the disgraceful response at Benghazi is all you need to know about leadership then & now!
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 1, 2020
The Trump team has politicized similar situations already. For example, after U.S. forces took out ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump claimed that the development was more significant than U.S. forces taking out Osama bin Laden, which happened under Obama’s watch.
In this case, journalist David Perry pointedly explained:
‘My cousin was the ambassador who died in Benghazi and every time Republicans dance on his grave, I get extremely angry… the exploitation of his death by people who stand for THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what he lived and died for – a pluralistic connected world where we all work harder to understand each other and live together in peace – has never ceased to outrage me.’
My cousin was the ambassador who died in Benghazi and every time Republicans dance on his grave, I get extremely angry.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 31, 2019
And the exploitation of his death by people who stand for THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what he lived and died for – a pluralistic connected world where we all work harder to understand each other and live together in peace – has never ceased to outrage me.
And that's all I got.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 31, 2019
Check out Twitter’s response below…
