Trump: I Wanted To Assassinate Syria's Bashar Assad
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he wanted to assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, contradicting his own past denials that he had ever considered killing Assad and weakening his claim to be an anti-war president.
“I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set,” Trump told ”Fox & Friends” in response to a question about Assad. Trump blamed his former defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, for holding him back: “Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general and I let him go.”
The president is pitching himself as less hawkish than most politicians from both major political parties in his reelection bid, going so far as promoting an anti-immigrant Norwegian politician’s improbable nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s campaign hailed the suggestion with Facebook ads, but misspelled the Nobel prize as Noble.
That nomination ― the second for Trump by the same politician ― was already an absurd long shot, given the president’s brutal policies that have dramatically increased civilian casualties abroad as a result of U.S. operations, and included troop buildups across the Middle East and enthusiasm for shows of force like dropping the so-called mother of all bombs in Afghanistan.
The Assad boast is a reminder that the president’s claimed dovishness is far less consistent than his penchant for impulsive escalations that could have serious and worrying national security consequences ― and make war more likely.
In trying to protect his family’s decades of authoritarian rule after popular uprisings began in Syria in 2011, Assad has repeatedly used chemical weapons against his own people and has killed tens of thousands of Syrians by other means.
Trump considered the assassination in April 2017, after the first major Syrian chemical weapons attack of his presidency, journalist Bob Woodward revealed in a book published in 2018. “Let’s kill the fucking lot of...
