Decorated combat veteran and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth tore Donald Trump to shreds on Monday for spending his weekend on the golf course even after it was reported that Russia was paying to have U.S. troops killed.
In a speech on the Senate floor, Duckworth said the bombshell news either shows that Trump is dangerously incompetent and didn’t know about the bounties, or that he knew all along and chose to cover it up.
“Both are damning for the man who is supposed to be in charge,” she said.
Duckworth said that even if Trump didn’t know about the bounties before the New York Times published its report on Friday, what he did after the report came out was appalling.
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“While [Trump] spent his weekend golfing, lying and making sure the buck stopped anywhere but with him, our troops in hotspots around the world were forced to wonder … whether a bounty might be placed on their heads tomorrow and whether President Trump would even care enough to respond if that was the case,” she said.
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Tammy Duckworth: “While he spent his wknd golfing, lying, & making sure the buck stopped anywhere but w/ him, our troops in hot spots were forced to wonder whether they might be next, whether a bounty might be placed on them, and whether POTUS would even care enough to respond.” pic.twitter.com/YhePUMPjZg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2020
Sen. Duckworth said:
Saying that Trump administration officials are prone to lying is like saying they’re prone to breathing. But there are two possible scenarios before us – both are damning for the man who is supposed to be in charge. The first is that Trump was never actually looped in. In this case, ignorance isn’t exculpatory. ‘I didn’t know that our adversary was helping kill American troops because no one told me’ is not an excuse for the commander in chief of the greatest military on earth. It is, in fact, a confession of incompetence. If he was truly never told, then that means that his own staff either believed he’s so compromised by Russia or they consider him so counterproductive to the running of the country that they thought it necessary to hide critical information about our national security from him. And if it is true that those who knew of this threat of American lives failed to tell the president then we should expect a president with such an affinity for firing senior officials to have no qualms about acting swiftly to remove the cabinet-level officials who failed to share this critical information with him. The second, far more likely option is that they’re covering for him, that Trump knew, that of course Trump knew, yet he still did not act. That this America First president went right on placing Russian interests ahead of American lives, kept on acting as Putin’s lackey, trying to score Russia an invite back into what would be the G-8 even as he learned that they were working with terrorists to target our troops. Then when the news finally broke on Friday, he decided to lie about what he had known all along, focus more on protecting his own personal reputation than protecting the troops sacrificing for our country overseas on his orders. Well, at least one American service member is reportedly dead as a result of these bounties. And while he spent his weekend golfing, lying and making sure the buck stopped anywhere but with him, our troops in hot spots around the world were forced to wonder whether they might be next, whether a bounty might be placed on their heads tomorrow and whether President Trump would even care enough to respond if that was the case.
Trump reacted like he already knew Russia was paying to kill U.S. troops
There is no question that Donald Trump is the most corrupt and incompetent president America’s ever had. The American people didn’t need another bombshell report from the New York Times to make that determination.
But the notion that he was completely in the dark about something this explosive is highly unlikely. Not to mention, Trump’s own behavior after the report came out – immediately firing up the presidential golf cart – suggests that it didn’t catch him off guard at all, that he knew all along.
Donald Trump only appreciates U.S. troops when he can use them as a political prop. When Vladimir Putin is paying to have them killed, it’s just another day at the golf course.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
