Trump enters at 53:00. Starts speech just after 56:00. The third rally in about a week and the best one. And while there is overlap between the three, each one is a unique presentation with different themes. My favourite bit was how he showed that he could be “presidential” if he wanted. Only an hour and a half out of your life.
I have seen this marker nowhere else but at Gateway Pundit: After First 1,000 Days in Office President Trump Holds 50% Approval Rating — 5 POINTS HIGHER THAN OBAMA – Despite Impeachment Scam!. This related article goes through just how exceptional these thousand days have been. I will stick to the charts but you really should read the article.
This is how the article ends and while I would like to say, “who could disagree?” there are many who do disagree, whose lack of sense and proportion is astonishing.
President Trump charges forward in spite of liberal and Deep State harassment. His results have been down right miraculous.
Overall President Trump’s first 1,000 days in office were outstanding. He was attacked from all sides and stood tall and to his principles. America is stronger and greater than ever before. The economy is growing and the world is safer. President Trump is doing all he can to Make America Great Again!
From PDT’s speech in Minneapolis on October 10. I have no doubt this is heartfelt and sincere, but as discussed here, here and here, we cannot declare a premature victory because more soldiers are likely to die. They are fighting for a worthy cause, the most important issue in the Western world today. This, unfortunately, is pure sentimentality in the face of the issues that confront us.
Donald Trump: (01:32:25)
So we have three choices. You’re ready? Here are the three choices. We don’t have any soldiers there because we’ve left. We won. We left. Take a victory, United States. We left. Take a victory, take a victory. Bring our troops back home.Donald Trump: (01:32:45)
I told this story yesterday, I have to sign letters, it’s the hardest thing I have to do. I sign letters, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Arkansas. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones from Alabama. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Somebody from some great state, I’m sorry to inform you, your son has been killed in combat. I’m so sorry.” And every letter is individually done because sometimes the parents, they’re grieving, and they get together with other parents, and I don’t want to see that it’s like the same letter. So we do different letters. It’s the hardest thing I have to do. Hardest thing.it’s the hardest thing I have … I was telling Tom Cotton, it’s the hardest thing that I have to do. And I sign those letters, and it just, it breaks your heart.Donald Trump: (01:33:45)
And by the way, there’s a time to fight. Nobody fights harder than I do. But there’s a time, and there’s not necessarily a time. But I send these letters out, quite a few. And sometimes I send letters out, it’s called blue on green, where we’re teaching people how to fight and then they turn the gun on our soldiers and shoot them in the back. And that’s the hardest thing for a parent. I have all of them. I know everyone. That’s the hardest thing for a parent when they get notification, because they learn how their child has died. When the so-called people that were teaching how to fight turn the gun on them, and shoot. We’ve had a lot of that, a lot of it in Afghanistan, more than we’ve ever had proportionately before. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. But I have to sign these letters.Donald Trump: (01:34:27)
And sometimes I go out to a place, Dover Air Force Base, it’s a very tough experience. Mike Pence goes, I go, other people go, Tom Cotton goes. We go out there, and we meet the parents and the families, the wives, the children, the sisters, the brothers. We meet them, and we talked to them, and their son or daughter is being flown in from some far away place in a coffin, and these things are just impossible. I don’t know how parents can do it, even. And I’ll meet them. And we have a particular Colonel, that’s all he does. So good. So professional. That’s what he does. He said, “I greet the dead, sir. I greet the dead.”Donald Trump: (01:35:18)
And what happens is this big incredible machine flies in, this tremendous cargo plane, and it flies in so powerful, so big. I’ll be talking to some of the parents, and they’ll act like they’re fine. I said, “How are you doing?” “We’re fine, sir. We’re fine. We’re really good.” I say, “That’s great.” And I’ll tell the Colonel, I’ll say, “Colonel, I think they’re doing great.” “No sir, they’re not going to do great. You’ll see.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about, this is the first time.Donald Trump: (01:35:51)
Then we went outside to the runway, and this incredible machine is flying in, and it lands, and it comes over, and it pulls up, and we have military guards, we have incredible talented musicians that do this. That’s what they do. What happens is that door opens up, and the Colonel told me, he said, “Sir, when that door opens up, those same people that you think are okay, do things that you’ll never see. You will hear sounds like you’ve never heard.” That’s what he does.Donald Trump: (01:36:25)
I saw that door open up with a coffin with a flag over it. The door was opened, and these beautiful soldiers, five or six on each side, lifting the coffin and walking down the runway, the plank, they call it, off this cargo plane. And I see parents make sounds, that were just 20 minutes ago absolutely fine, make sounds, scream and cry like you’ve never seen before. The Colonel was telling me that, “Sir, you’ll see things that you’ve never seen before. A mother who was fine 20 minutes ago, you think, breaking the military line and jumping off, and then jumping onto a coffin of her son or her daughter, jumping on, on top of the flowers, on top of the American flag.” I’ve seen this.Donald Trump: (01:37:21)
Then I have all these people that want to stay. They want to stay. And I don’t want to stay. We were supposed to be in Syria for 30 days. We’ve now been there for 10 years. We were supposed to be in Afghanistan for a short period of time. We’re now going to be there for close to 19 years. It’s time to bring them home. It’s time to bring them home. It’s true. Time to bring them home. We’ve done our job, we’ve defeated everyone that we’re supposed to defeat. And now we are, we are policing, we are now policing. That’s what we’re doing. We’re policing. And that, as I said, no more respect for the police, but these are military people, and those are police, but we are now policing. We’re not fighting, we’re policing. And you know what? After all of these years … One other story, and I have to tell you. I go to Walter Reed on Friday, and I do it quite often. I gave out five Purple Hearts. And I meet people that are so beautiful, so amazing. I met five warriors, and one was so badly hurt, with the loss of arms and a leg, another one … they’re just very, very devastated. But these are great, great people. And I gave out the Purple Heart. And I see the parents, and I have to say, Walter Reed, I want to just say, the doctors there, the job they do, you know, you hear so many complaints about doctors and about the vets, and the vets’ care, and nobody’s done better. We got choice for the vets. We did things for the vets that nobody thought would be possible.Donald Trump: (01:39:26)
But I saw these young men, and I gave them their Purple Hearts. And their parents were there crying. And one of them was so amazing. I said, “What’s your problem?” “Sir, my face was blown apart. My nose was absolutely just blown apart.” He said, “Sir, it’s incredible.” And I looked at him, I said, “That’s the most beautiful nose I’ve ever seen. What do you mean?” He said, “A doctor worked on my face for 10 hours in the field. He said there were a thousand fragments.” Now I don’t know if that’s right, but well, a lot. He meant a lot. “He said there were a thousand fragments. He rebuilt my nose with glue. He glued the bones together. He rebuilt my nose.” I say, “You have the most beautiful nose I’ve ever seen,” and it’s true. And his father came over to me, he said, “Sir,” father was crying, he said, “Sir, honestly, my son looks better now.” He said, “My son did not have a good look. He knows. Now look at it, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.”Donald Trump: (01:40:34)
But these doctors at Walter Reed, and these Army, and Marine, and the medical doctors, they are unbelievably great people. And they see sights that you and I hopefully will never see. They see things that nobody will ever see, and there’s nobody like them. And I have to give a shout out to those people, there’s nobody like them. So in the case of Turkey, and Syria, and the Kurds, we could send in a thousand troops for a military conflict with Turkey. No, you don’t want to do that. We could hit Turkey very hard financially. Or we could mediate a deal between Turkey and the Kurds. I like that. You know? Let’s mediate a deal. But remember they’ve been fighting each other for hundreds of years, and we were artificially put there, in this case by President Obama. So we did our job. We knocked out.
The news just in: Trump: U.S. troops to stay in Middle East, prevent ISIS resurgence.
President Donald Trump says the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops he has ordered to leave Syria will remain in the Middle East to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State threat.
In a written statement Monday announcing his authorization of economic sanctions on Turkey, Trump made clear that the withdrawing troops will leave Syria entirely.
He said the troops will “redeploy and remain in the region.” He described their mission as “monitoring the situation” and preventing a “repeat of 2014,” when IS fighters who had organized in Syria as a fighting force swept into neighboring Iraq and took control of Iraq’s north and west.
Trump confirmed that the small number of U.S. troops at a base in southern Syria will remain there.
Bringing the troops home is not a foreign policy objective, as much as it might be an aspiration. Defeating ISIS is a foreign policy objective, which is why these troops are not coming home. A premature declaration of victory would have been a huge mistake. Part of what I truly admire about PDT is that he knows what he wants, what he wants is almost always what I want, and he is flexible enough so that when he makes a mistake that he reverses course as soon as he can.
Only just seen this but it is easy to believe: Trump Sends Emergency Delegation to Turkey Amid Bloody Offensive in Syria. From The Free Beacon so not from the Fake News Media.
A delegation of senior Trump administration officials will depart for Turkey “as soon as possible” to negotiate a ceasefire following Ankara’s bloody offensive into Syria that killed civilians and helped to reinvigorate the ISIS terror group, according to senior administration officials.
The delegation will seek to “achieve a deal” in the coming days to end the full-scale battle that erupted when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan permitted his forces to invade Syria following an announcement by President Donald Trump that he is removing American forces from the region.
The troop withdrawal, which has been criticized by both Republican and Democratic leaders, set the stage for a renewed wave of violence in Syria that U.S. officials say has threatened to erase American gains in defeating ISIS terrorists.
The Turkish incursion into Syria “has upturned one of the real success stories” of the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS, according to one senior administration official who briefed reporters on the latest developments early Monday evening. “These are crucial diplomatic and security interests for us and the region.”
The United States has now been left to “restore the situation as best we can,” the officials said.
There is also then the story that leads at Drudge. It’s from The New York Times so make of it what you will.
ERDOGAN HOLDING 50 US NUKES ‘HOSTAGE’
What a mess!
Donald Trump is the president for our times, and in many ways the last hope for our Western Civilisation and our way of life. But it’s not as if I have never been critical of his approach to issues, and I am not here discussing interest rates but foreign policy. Let me take you to a post I wrote on April 17, 2017: Now what and where does it go from here? This post was also related to the war in Syria which followed Trump bombing Syria after it had used poison gas on children:
It reminds me how lacking in common sense the foreign policy of democratic nations have become. If the same people who support this kind of action are the same as those who put up “Refugees Welcome” signs then the ability to reason about consequences is severely impaired. We are dealing with national interests and protecting our borders and way of life. This is as stupid as “the war on terror” when it is, as Trump used to say, a war on radical Islamic terrorism. Now we are in the midst of a battle to remove chemical weapons from battles. That’s fine as a tenth level issue. There are plenty of ways to kill people, even children. To wallow in how awful it is to see people die this way rather than in some other way is ridiculous. The Allied bombing of Germany killed many many children. It is not a primary war aim, or even secondary, to start worrying about the particular way one side is attacking and killing the other. The aim should be to win or get out. What exactly was Trump trying to do? Completely lost on me.
I had the same sense of loss in the President’s speech in Minnesota the other day when he went on about how awful it is to greet the return of soldiers who have died in the field and to meet with their families. I have no doubt it is, but this is a real war with real consequences if we do not win. There are many things to weigh up in deciding what to do in the Middle East, but the one that is a bottom rung issue, as awful as it no doubt is, is to get bogged down in the emotionalism of the death of our soldiers.
America can now be portrayed as failing to protect its allies, as diminishing its determination to eradicate ISIS, as siding with Turkey against our own genuine allies and as being vulnerable to forms of blackmail that the Islamic State specialises in. To quote again from that previous post.
So let me put it like this: just exactly what are America’s war aims in Syria? And how will I be able to tell when those war aims have been achieved? Here the issue is stated in the way I think of it and the kind of questions that need to be answered before sending the military into conflict:
The outstanding politico-military lesson is an old one: that one clarify one’s aim before one embarks upon a military operation; ruthlessly and objectively dissect and analyse where it will lead, what is to be gained from it, and what one will be faced with when it is over.
If Donald Trump is not prepared to fight this one out, and if a relative handful of soldiers sitting in Syria is an issue in any way, then this is something to really worry about. I not only wrote on this once before, but I did so twice: America’s war aims. I will end this post the same as I did that one.
Let me give the last word to Tom Cotton, who is destined to succeed Donald Trump in 2024.
The world now sees that President Trump does not share his predecessor’s reluctance to use force. And that’s why nations across the world have rallied to our side, while Russia and Iran are among the few to have condemned the attack.
The threat of the use of force — and its actual use when necessary — is an essential foundation for effective diplomacy. Mr. Obama’s lack of credibility is one reason the United States watched in isolation as Russia and Iran took the lead at recent Syrian peace conferences. It’s also why Iran got the better of us in the nuclear negotiations and North Korea has defied us for years.
With our credibility restored, the United States can get back on offense around the world. In Syria, Mr. Assad knows that we have many more Tomahawk missiles than he has airfields. So do his supporters in Moscow and Tehran.
You will notice if you read the article, other than a passing reference at the start to poison gas in Syria, the rest is about the re-establishment of American power. And there is nothing sentimental about that.
The quote is the title of the linked article by Caroline Glick, as near as anyone I can think of whom I trust on Middle Eastern politics. She says that Trump did not betray the Kurds but beyond that, who knows where things will go. This is the last two lines of the article.
What is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfil.
Having followed the War party in American politics since the start of the century this is a change. But the intervening years of Obama cured me of the American combination of military victory united with attempting to bring peace amid the various factions of the ME. Whatever else, so far on everything that I have a strong view on, Trump has taken the right side and done the right thing. Here I can only hope, but I am happy to read CG’s views back Trump’s.
Mike Pence comes in at 51:00
PDT @ 104:30.
Trump is angry, and it really comes across. Why everyone else isn’t as angry is the question.
I’ll start with this: Middle East wars will rage with or without America’s heavy presence. It’s from The Times via The Australian so take it for what it is.
As long as the West and its dwindling number of allies in the Middle East concentrated on the task of defeating the jihadist thugs of Islamic State, there was a kind of ramshackle consensus about the task in hand. Now that the so-called caliphate has been broken, all hell is breaking loose.
This is partly because of the ugly compromises needed to smash a nimble enemy such as ISIS. In Syria, America (under Barack Obama and Donald Trump) enlisted the Kurds as its janissaries, ready to risk their lives on the ground. The US did so in full knowledge that some were more than hardened soldiers.
One faction was also affiliated to the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party that has been a thorn in Turkey’s side for more than 40 years.
Look up Kurdistan Workers Party on Wikipedia and you find this.
The PKK was founded in 1978 in the village of Fis (near Lice) by a group of Kurdish students led by Abdullah Öcalan and 1979 it made its existence known to the public. The PKK’s ideology was originally a fusion of revolutionary socialism and Kurdish nationalism, seeking the foundation of an independent Communist state in the region….
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by several states and organizations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the European Union.
To which I will append this.
From Trump: Europe Won’t Help, and We’re Not Going to Hold Thousands of ISIS Fighters at Guantanamo Bay. Watch the video and hear PDT say it himself.
“We’re not bringing 50, 60, 70 – or even 100,000 people to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re not going to be paying them for the next 50 years – or paying to take care of them for the next 50 years.”
He characterized the European response to Washington’s appeals as another example of allies taking advantage of the U.S., and treating it as a “sucker.”
Meanwhile, who has any idea of which side who is on or what they are fighting for or against. And same again here. Who should we support, do you think?
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are dominated by fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), whom Turkey views as terrorists because of links to the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) – a radical group which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, has designated a terrorist organization.
Of course none of these countries want these jihadists back. To continue the story:
European governments have voiced reluctance to repatriate citizens who joined ISIS’ jihad. Reasons vary, but include concerns that difficulties in obtaining clear evidence of wrongdoing will see suspects dodge conviction and be released back into society.
In France, public opinion runs strongly against repatriating jihadists, although there is considerable support for allowing the French wives and children to return home.
My enemy’s enemy may sometimes be my friend, but it is always worth remembering that my enemy is still my enemy.
As for what to do, I have no idea, other than to do what will turn out best in the long run.
From Trump: Europe Won’t Help, and We’re Not Going to Hold Thousands of ISIS Fighters at Guantanamo Bay. Watch the video and hear PDT say it himself.
“We’re not bringing 50, 60, 70 – or even 100,000 people to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re not going to be paying them for the next 50 years – or paying to take care of them for the next 50 years.”
He characterized the European response to Washington’s appeals as another example of allies taking advantage of the U.S., and treating it as a “sucker.”
Meanwhile, who has any idea of which side who is on or what they are fighting for or against. And same again here. Who should we support, do you think?
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are dominated by fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), whom Turkey views as terrorists because of links to the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) – a radical group which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, has designated a terrorist organization.
Of course none of these countries want these jihadists back. To continue the story:
European governments have voiced reluctance to repatriate citizens who joined ISIS’ jihad. Reasons vary, but include concerns that difficulties in obtaining clear evidence of wrongdoing will see suspects dodge conviction and be released back into society.
In France, public opinion runs strongly against repatriating jihadists, although there is considerable support for allowing the French wives and children to return home.
There is no saving anyone from their own stupidity.
Law of Markets 