Donald Trump bragged about ending a make-believe war on Christmas but he and Defense Secretary Pete “Whiskeyleaks” Hegseth used what is supposedly their sacred Christian holiday to wreak real needless death and destruction in Nigeria. No word yet on whether Hegseth had hit the eggnog previously.
According to an unnamed military official who spoke to The New York Times, the U.S. launched more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles in two ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria. The initial assessment of U.S. Africa Command was that ‘multiple’ ISIS terrorists were killed.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Trump is either lying about what happened or delusional or just plain ignorant, or all of the above.
Worse, it looks like the Muslims killed were not terrorists and there is no Christian genocide there.
The New York Times tried to make this latest round of Trump/Hegseth murders sound as bland as possible in an article titled, “Facts Clash With Trump Claim of Hitting ISIS and Shielding Nigerian Christians.”
But the facts speak for themselves. The Times quoted Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto (where the missiles hit) saying recently that the area does “not have a problem with persecution” of Christians.
“What the strikes immediately achieved is not clear, though reports emerged on Friday morning that one of the areas that was hit was the outskirts of Jabo, a town in Sokoto that analysts said was not known to harbor any terrorist or bandit groups," The Times further reported. “Analysts say that the terrorist group in Nigeria with the best documented links to the Islamic State is in northeastern Nigeria, on the other side of the country from Sokoto State.”
So why did Trump and Hegseth start this latest round of death and destruction?
It looks a lot like they thought it would be good for their evangelical Christian cred. Trump seems to have taken the word of his political cronies over any real intelligence analysts, assuming there are any legit ones left in the administration. After all, doing his actual job could interfere with President Snoozy’s nap or TV time!
These two paragraphs from The Times say it all:
Vincent Foucher, a research fellow with the National Center for Scientific Research in France, said that the strikes would be likely to resonate with some American Christians and political allies of Mr. Trump who have amplified the narrative that Christians in Nigeria are being singled out for persecution.
“It’s a good way for the U.S., for Trump, to show to the American evangelical right that he’s doing something about Nigeria,” Mr. Foucher said. For the United States, he added, the strikes address both “Trump’s desire for publicity and the American security establishment’s concern about the Islamic State.”
Ever a disgrace to the office of the presidency, Trump included a social media post about the strike in his deluge of 150 bonkers posts on Christmas. It was a binge of craziness that would have Fox News pushing the 25th Amendment 24/7 had any Democrat gone so far off the deep end (again). In this particular manic episode, Trump wrote: “The United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries! … MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
Somewhere, Jesus must be crying.
