Ignatius: Trumps wrecking-ball approach may swing back to hit him
President Trump’s slash-and-burn actions in his first week have been dramatic, but dangerously lacking in a consensus of support, even within his own administration. The risks were evident in the collapse of a planned meeting with Mexico’s president and in Trump’s embrace of torture tactics rejected by his secretary of defense and CIA director.
Trump’s “tweet from the hip” style produced its first real foreign rupture Thursday, when Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto canceled a planned visit to Washington, D.C. That followed Trump’s tweet that he should stay away if he wasn’t ready to pay for the often-proclaimed border wall.
The Twitter grenade blew up what had been an attempt to finesse the issue with a delayed Mexican financial contribution for the wall, an approach that Trump himself had only hours before supported in an interview with ABC’s David Muir. Now, Trump has an avoidable Mexico crisis to deal with.
The torture issue was another self-inflicted wound. The CIA doesn’t want to go back into the secret detention and waterboarding business. There’s a law banning torture, for the simple reason that it “shocks the conscience” of many Americans. And some foreign intelligence services would refuse to share information with an America that used such techniques.
http://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/ignatius-trumps-wrecking-ball-approach-may-swing-back-to-hit-him/
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