By David Weigel
Wednesday, July 06, 2016
By now, everyone's aware that Donald Trump wandered off
message Tuesday night and told an audience in Raleigh, N.C., that Saddam
Hussein, for all his sins, "killed terrorists."
"He did that so good," the presumed GOP
presidential nominee said. "They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t
talk. They were terrorists. It was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.
You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq. It’s like Harvard, okay? So
sad."
There were spasms of outrage, from Hillary Clinton's
campaign ("Donald Trump’s praise for brutal strongmen seemingly knows no
bounds") to the perpetually disappointed-to-hear-this House Speaker Paul
D. Ryan (Hussein "was one of the 20th century’s most evil people").
And in outrage mode, it was easy to ignore something Clinton spokesman Jake
Sullivan said in his reaction. Trump didn't just praise Hussein. He "yet
again lauded" him. Trump had used this language many, many times, with
plenty of cameras pointed at him.
It all seemed curious to David Martosko, the Daily Mail
reporter who has covered Trump more closely than almost anyone in this campaign
year.
Remarkable part about the Saddam
thing isn't what Trump said. He's said it before. It's how media jumped on this
when Hillary needed it.
- David Martosko 5:39 AM - 6
Jul2016
Defining "the media" so broadly rarely makes
sense. It made sense Tuesday night. Trump's insistence that Hussein should have
remained in power to "kill terrorists" is actually one of his most
consistent lines. It clashes completely with the Washington consensus but taps
into voter anger at how the Iraq War, sold as a quick-and-easy crusade against
evil, destabilized the Middle East and allowed groups such as the Islamic State
to form and grow.
Trump began saying this at his campaign rallies last
summer. (As Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski has reported, there is no record of him
saying it before the 2003 invasion.) Reporters followed up; Trump repeated
himself. In an October 2015 interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, long before votes
were cast, Trump reiterated his view that the world was better off with Hussein
in power -- and using brutal peacekeeping tactics.
"Iraq used to be: No terrorism," Trump said.
"He would kill the terrorists immediately. Now it's Harvard for
terrorism."
Trump said this in many of the rallies that cable news
played live throughout that season. If anyone missed it, he repeated it in an
interview with CBS News's John Dickerson, as part of the run-up to South
Carolina's primary debate.
Trump's victory in that state — and the humiliating,
campaign-ending defeat of Jeb Bush — happened with the "Saddam killed
terrorists" argument pretty well hashed out. Pundits who expected voters
to rediscover their ardor for the Bush family — pundits including Sen. Lindsey
O. Graham (R-S.C.) — instead watched some of the state's most veteran-heavy
communities break for Trump.
So what was different last night? Clinton's campaign said it was different. In Politico, we
learn that Trump's Hussein praise "finally caught up with him"
because "Hillary Clinton's campaign tore into his latest comments."
NBC News notes that Trump said this at a rally with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.),
which could lead to a clash and some awkward questions; otherwise, the only new
thing is that "Hillary Clinton's campaign seized the opportunity to once
more paint Trump as unfit for office."
And so on. The story is not that Trump argued that the
United States would be better off if a dictator had been allowed to stay in
power in Iraq; the story is that things are different now, because the
presumptive Democratic nominee is whacking him for saying it.
The timing of the Clinton campaign's attack was telling,
for two reasons. First, and most obviously, whaling on Trump gave the campaign
a chance to pivot on a day when the director of the FBI held an unusual and
damaging news conference saying that the Democratic candidate, whom most voters
consider untrustworthy, had behaved recklessly with classified email. The media
went along with this by noting the irony, and remarking that Trump stepped on
what could have been a good news cycle.
Second, Trump said all of this just hours before the
long-awaited release of findings from a inquiry into the United Kingdom's role
in invading Iraq. The Chilcot Report has found more of what war and national
security reporters found after 2003 -- that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were
raring to invade Iraq before a real case was made for doing so. The report is
particularly damning for Blair, who just six years after leaving office is a
pariah, his own Labour Party led by a member of its far left who had opposed
all of Blair's "modernizing" policies and opposed the war.
The point is that Trump has been saying, for quite some
time, that the United States should not have gone to war in Iraq, and that it
should side with dictators as long as they "kill terrorists." The
Republican primary electorate endorsed that view. Clinton, as a senator and
then as secretary of state, took another view, and backed the use of American
power to remove both Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi. There's video of
Clinton gleefully saying "We came, we saw, he died" upon learning
that Gaddafi had been torn apart by his own people. This has never been treated
like a gaffe; but Trump's "Saddam killed terrorists" riff suddenly
is.
By consistently covering Trump's argument over time, and
by following up on it, media outlets did their job to inform voters. That was
why Tuesday night's collective Captain Renault moment was so strange, and so
demonstrative of why many media consumers are skeptical of what they're
hearing. Instead of a debate on the facts -- should Hussein have been removed?
Did he "kill terrorists," in a contradiction of what Americans were
told before the war? -- there was manufactured outrage, straight from a rival
campaign.
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