With Friends Like Trump Who Needs Enemies
If hypocrisy were a virtue Donald Trump would’ve been canonized a long time ago.
If hypocrisy were a virtue Donald Trump would’ve been canonized a long time ago. It is not, of course, and the president is as far from sainthood as the Earth is from the Sun, which makes it necessary to keep exposing his blatant lies and shameless doublespeak.
A recent example –probably not the latest—is his attempt to spin the attack on Syria as the result of his moral outrage about that country’s government supposed use of chemical weapons against its own population and his concern for the well-being of the Syrian people.
“The evil and despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air,” Trump told the nation on a Friday televised address. “These are not the actions of a man. They are crimes of a monster instead.”
Spoken like a true humanitarian. Except that despite the president’s moving words about the suffering of Syrian “mothers and fathers, infants and children”, Trump has slammed the door in the faces of the people fleeing from the “monster” Bashar al-Assad.
Believe it or not, this year only 11 –yes, eleven– Syrian asylum-seekers have been taken in by the U.S. Yet, the country accepted thousands in previous years. In 2015, during Barak Obama’s time at the Oval Office, 2,192 refuges were admitted, as were 15,479 in 2916 and 3,024 last year, according to State Department figures.
You may be asking yourself how can the aging White House occupant claim he cares about the plight of the Syrian people and then do everything in his power to keep them out of the country? As I said before, if hypocrisy were a virtue…
Yet, outrageous as it is, this shocking demonstration of Trump’s lack of morals, is far from being unique or even rare. Another blatant example of his capacity for hypocrisy is the dismantling of the advances made in U.S.-Cuba relations during Obama’s presidency.
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Claiming his concern for the well-being of the people of Cuba, the former reality TV actor has, in fact, regressed to the times in which unremitting hostility and irrationality marked relations between the two nations. Following the advice of the morally-challenged Marco Rubio, Trump has moved to tighten trade and travel restrictions and, for all intents and purposes, has paralyzed consular services at its Havana embassy after withdrawing most of its personnel with the excuse of a preposterous “sonic attack.”
Once again one is left to wonder how can Trump state he cares about the suffering of the Cuban people, while adopting measures designed to make more difficult the lives of Cuban children and families?
Just a few days before the 57th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba orchestrated by Washington, that took place on April 17, 1961, such blatant hypocrisy was exposed by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla at the America’s Summit in Lima, Perú. He made it clear that all hopes for normal relations have been killed by the Trump administration and exposed Trump’s hypocrisy.
After stating the Cuban government’s condemnation of the U.S. attack on Syria, which he called a “flagrant violation of the principles of international law,” Rodríguez Parrilla forcefully denounced the U.S. double standard on a number of issues.
The U.S. is a country “where students die by firearms, sacrificed to the imperative of a political lobby,” and where “they promote walls, militarization of borders, massive deportations, including children who were born in their own territory,” the Cuban minister said among other things.
No, Trump won’t be canonized any time soon. As a matter of fact, with “friends” like him, the peoples of Syria and Cuba don’t need enemies.
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