There’s outrageous statements and then there’s Donald Trump. The man opens his mouth and the world holds its breath in anticipation of the illogical stream of contradictions, falsehoods, and fantastical flights of fancy we’ve come to associate with the American President.
Critics may often accuse him of being a Billy Liar, but Trump is a linguistic innovator. He has created his own mode of speaking that has a rhythm, a cadence, and a reality all of its own.
The fact that Donald Trump’s reality doesn’t tend to share any common ground with the one everyone else is familiar with is neither here nor there. When he speaks, the world listens, the media goes into a frenzy, social media has a meltdown, and Shakespeare turns slowly in his grave and mutters with great melancholy, ‘Not again!’
Trump has not only mastered the grand art of butchering the English language beyond all sense and syllable, but he uses it as a vehicle to deliver such grandiose, egotistical, and outlandish statements, that the only reasonable defence for minds not equipped to deal with the steel-trap mentality of the megalomaniac is to think they must be true.
Often they’re not. But when it comes to his latest shock bomb, let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and dig in deep in search of those most rarest resources – the facts!
According to Politico, Trump called into conservative host Mark Levin’s radio show on Tuesday and explained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “a war hero ‘cause we worked together.”
If Trump had left it at that, the statement would be contentious enough, considering Netanyahu has been the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant since last November for alleged war crimes in Gaza. However, as a keen advocate of rushing in where angels fear to tread, Trump added, “He’s a war hero. I guess I am too.”
It’s a bold thing for anyone to say, but for someone under the fierce spotlight of public scrutiny 24-7 it’s almost like the man has a superhuman instinct for what will keep him in the headlines.
Trump, who has never been in the services or fought in an actual conflict, qualified his big statement with, “Nobody cares. But I am (a war hero) too. I mean, I sent those planes.”
It is thought that ‘those planes’ refer to the attack on Iran’s subterranean nuclear facilities that he ordered in June to help destroy Tehran’s nuclear program.
Much like a stealth bomber, it seems to have passed Trump by that he wasn’t actually flying in the planes. Yet, with his head in the clouds and his finger on the button, Trump’s flights of fantasy are supersonic.
For the benefit of the jury, let’s rewind the tape to 2015, when Trump argued that Arizona Republican Senator John McCain was ‘not a war hero’ despite having spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Why did Trump refuse to allow his fellow statesman his moment in the sun? Was it perhaps jealousy because Trump had received, count them, five deferments from the Vietnam War draft?
Not on your Nelly! Trump didn’t consider McCain a war hero because, “I like people who were not captured.”
And there you have it!
There’s reason, there’s rhyme, and then there’s Trump.
