Dana Milbank: Is Trump clear where hes steering ship of state?
The USS Carl Vinson, 1,100 feet long, has a displacement of 97,000 tons and sails with two nuclear reactors and about 60 aircraft. It’s escorted by a guided-missile cruiser and two destroyers.
So how did President Trump lose it?
In an interview with Fox Business taped on April 11, Trump confirmed a dramatic escalation in the nuclear standoff with North Korea, saying he was redirecting Navy ships to the area. “We are sending an armada — very powerful,” Trump said.
Tough talk — except the Vinson strike group was not heading toward North Korea. It was continuing previously scheduled exercises with Australian forces in the Indian Ocean. Four days after Trump spoke of his Korea-bound armada, a military trade publication noticed that photos released by the Navy showed the carrier off Indonesia — 3,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula — and apparently heading the other way.
Was the Vinson looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? Had Percy Jackson lured it into the Sea of Monsters, from which it would emerge somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle with Amelia Earhart, Grand Duchess Anastasia and Jimmy Hoffa?
There has been much speculation about Trump’s nonsense talk about his “armada.” Administration officials suggested a miscommunication between the Pentagon and the White House. Others suspected deliberate psy-ops against North Korea and China.
I put the question to my former colleague Tom Ricks, military writer and national security specialist at the New America Foundation. Ricks’ hypothesis: Trump didn’t have any idea where his armada was. “He probably saw it on TV.”
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