Be honest, especially if you’ve never liked Donald Trump.
Didn’t it make you feel good to hear the president explain his decision to attack Syria by declaring, “No child of God should ever suffer this horror”?
Whether his name was Clinton, Bush, Obama, or, in this historic instance, Trump, a party label shouldn’t have mattered because this was one of those times, like 9/11, when as a country we cut to the chase and realize our collective identity as Americans transcends our tribal identities as Republicans and Democrats.
Evil is as nonpartisan as it gets, and what could be more evil than unleashing a nerve gas attack that saw more than 80 lives, many of them innocent children, perish with unspeakable horror?
That’s what Syrian dictator Bashar Assad unconscionably did.
“Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children,” Trump noted with bristling contempt. “It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.”
As he spoke his voice was thick with moral indignation.
So, as our commander in chief, he ordered more than 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles to be fired from the USS Porter and the USS Ross, both on duty in the Mediterranean Sea, with the specific mission of destroying a Syrian air base believed to hold chemical weapons.
That’s how you communicate with savages.
This was the Trump of the campaign trail, the one who vowed we would once again walk tall in the eyes of the world.
To be sure, there’ll be those who’ll protest simply because he was not their choice to be president. Shame on them.
Was the death of Osama bin Laden any less welcomed by those who wished for the defeat of Barack Obama, simply because he got to announce that the leader of al-Qaeda had been killed by American forces?
No. Party affiliations shrink when measured against what’s best for America.
For more than a week we heard demagogues in the U.S. Senate hurling venomous attacks across the aisle during their deliberations on Neil Gorsuch’s worthiness to sit on the Supreme Court.
Their flat-out ugly exchanges brought to mind Harry Truman’s disdain for the manipulative Washington crowd.
“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician,” he said. “And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
Every once in a while, however, we get to remember what it feels like to be seen as the good guys, and slapping Assad is one of those occasions.
Thank you, Mr. President.
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