Krugman knows why Trump launched an air strike and it's nothing to do with avenging Syrian children
The Trump administration now knows that it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failures by bombing someone.”
ost presidents have a broad team of advisors whose job it is to carefully weigh domestic and foreign policy decisions. Our current commander in chief prefers watching hours of Fox News and firing off a few missiles in Syria when his favorite anchors report plunging approval ratings. It is, as Paul Krugman writes in Monday’s column, governing by publicity stunt—cheap ploys for attention and approval, with no overarching strategy.
The first stunt of the administration came before before Trump was even inaugurated. It seems like a decade in Trump administration years, but it was only a few months ago that he, and worse, the mainstream media, was crowing about how he prevented a Carrier air-conditioning plant from moving 1,100 jobs overseas. In fact, it was more like 700 jobs. But does that really matter when, as Krugman reminds us, “Around 75,000 U.S. workers are laid off or fired every working day, so a few hundred here or there hardly matter for the overall picture. Whatever Mr. Trump did or didn’t achieve with Carrier, the real question was whether he would take steps to make a lasting difference.”
The answer is a resounding no. Even corporations and investors, “have decided that the Carrier deal was all show, no substance, that for all his protectionist rhetoric Mr. Trump is a paper tiger in practice.” Jobs are still moving to Mexico, the Mexican peso having recovered any post-election losses.
Why confront reality when smoke and mirrors seems to bring better media coverage? This brings us to the Syrian missile strikes, about which Krugman does not hold back: “Showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility…The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/paul-krugman-knows-why-trump-launched-an-air-strike-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-avenging-syrian-children/
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