OPINION:
Donald Trump gets a lot of advice, some of it friendly and most of it not, about how he should “act presidential.” We, too, have offered suggestions about how he could look and speak more like a president, now that there’s a real possibility that he could become one.
The best such advice the Donald should take now is not, under any circumstances, to look to Barack Obama as the model.
Mr. Obama, who imagines himself Joe Cool, lost his temper and his judgment Tuesday with his lecture that long-suffering citizens of America must stop picking on “radical Islam” and adjust their attitudes to become more careful in how they take offense. Americans must understand that the United States is not at war with Islam, and Hillary Clinton, as usual playing the Obama clone, echoed the sentiment. It’s a sentiment with which we entirely agree.
But Mr. Obama, a man too intelligent to miss the point, but does, should understand that it’s not America that is at war with Islam, but that radical Islam (he surely knows the difference) is clearly, definitely and obviously at war against the United States. We saw that writ large in blood in Orlando, as we earlier saw it writ large in blood at San Bernardino, and on the streets of Paris and Brussels. None is so blind as to have eyes and cannot see.
Rarely has a president so given himself to sensation and passion, repeating clichs about guns and invoking familiar bogeymen in a search for something to say. There was no attempt to reassure the millions who are frightened by followers of a distorted version of a religion who have brought jihad to America at last. “This was a chance for the president to try to bring us together,” says Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but “he is so focused on this presidential campaign he let himself go.”
Indeed, the president hammered Mr. Trump for a “dangerous” mindset, “loose talk and sloppiness” about the identity of the enemy. He even accused Mr. Trump of driving Muslims into the arms of radical Islamists.
Mr. Obama is particularly irked that Americans, who look at the nation’s enemies with a hard, cold eye, think he’s afraid to call the enemy by its right name. “What exactly would it change [to use that right name]?” he asked. “Would it make [ISIS] less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
No, but a leader who knows the enemy by its name, who wants to lead, who does not leave the front to lead from behind, would reassure Americans and intimidate the evil men who plot war against America. What we get from Barack Obama are lectures about America’s failings, about the sins of the Crusades and about American “attitudes” that must be corrected.
The Islamic State, or ISIS or ISIL or whatever name is in fashion this week, exploded in Iraq because President Obama would not face up to challenge. Mr. Trump, with his unerring gift for getting under thin skin wherever he finds it, told a rally in North Carolina that “the president is more angry at me than he was at the shooter. The level of anger, that’s the kind of anger that he should have for the shooter and these killers that shouldn’t be here.” In other words, the president should act presidential.
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