If Eric Trump is to be believed (here’s the original UK/Telegraph interview) Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Syria was scripted by his daughter Ivanka Trump.
In other words, a 35-year old woman with no prior foreign policy experience — whose professional career has been as a businesswoman who launched her own boutique clothing and fashion accessory line — just put the United States on a high-risk trajectory towards greater involvement in an unstable, highly fraught conflict that many fear could set off World War Three.
I can’t decide which scenario is worse :
1) the conspiracy theory that Lawrence O’Donnell recently floated, that Donald Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airbase in response to an alleged Assad regime use of chemical weapons on civilians might have been part of an evil scheme to distract the American public and media from the ongoing investigations into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russian efforts to sabotage the 2016 election or…
2) the possibility that Trump’s 180-degree reversal on taking such unilateral action against the Syrian regime, a prospect Trump has previously dismissed as idiotic and potentially disastrous, might have occurred as a teary-eyed Ivanka walked into the Oval Office with a laptop to show her father footage of the Syrian chemical weapons victims.
As some commenters observed, both 1) and 2) could be true. And, in his interview with the UK/Telegraph, Eric Trump also gave inadvertent weight to 1) (a point just picked up by Politico) by stating that “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie”. So, the bombing helped inoculate Eric’s father against the Trump/Russia scandals ? OK then. He said it.
In either case (or both), the optics are not good. And if door number two be true, Americans must confront the reality that much of the presidency, and especially U.S. foreign policy, is being run (winged, actually) by a husband/wife duo worth about $700 million, who have shown no prior interest in foreign policy (let alone studied it) and whose claim to relevant experience would include being close to one of Vladimir Putin’s most important billionaire oligarch allies.
And on it goes.