Monday marked the third day of Donald Trump’s “Al-Baghdadi Died Like a Dog” victory tour. On Saturday night, a few hours after a raid by U.S. commandos on a compound in Barisha, a village in northwest Syria, the President tweeted, “Something very big has just happened!” On Sunday morning, he delivered a forty-eight-minute briefing, preëmpting the weekly news shows, in which he described the raid in gory detail, tossing in some of his trademark embellishments and fabrications along the way. Twenty-four hours later, he was back on his soapbox. “So, we had a great weekend for our country,” he told the press pool at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning. “We captured a man that should’ve been caught a long time ago.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, wasn’t captured, of course. According to the version of events Trump provided on Sunday morning, al-Baghdadi blew himself up, in a tunnel under the compound, “as our dogs chased him down,” and “he died like a dog.” But, as the common refrain suggests, even though you can’t take what Trump says literally, you shouldn’t ignore it completely, especially when he is trying to spin a single successful strike by the U.S. military into a huge strategic victory for his embattled Presidency. “He’s done tremendous damage,” Trump continued, referring to al-Baghdadi. “But it was an amazing display of intelligence and military power and coördination and getting along with people. Lots of great things happened. So that was a big, big day and a big weekend, and we’re very happy about it.”
If that sounded like a wrap, it wasn’t. Trump also confirmed that he is considering releasing some of the footage from the raid, which he, Vice-President Mike Pence, and a number of others watched, in real time, from the White House Situation Room. This is the footage, reportedly shot from above the compound, that Trump described on Sunday as “something really amazing to see … as though you were watching a movie.” When Trump says he’s considering releasing the footage, you can assume he’s already screaming at people in the White House about why it isn’t out there already. Presumably, if Trump had his way, a fully narrated version would be released immediately, and it would be supplemented by a prime-time Fox miniseries—starring him, of course, because, in his telling, he was the mastermind behind the entire thing.
“Well, I’ll tell you, from the first day I came to office—and now we’re getting close to three years—I would say, ‘Where’s al-Baghdadi? I want al-Baghdadi,’ ’’ he said on Sunday morning. “And we would kill terrorist leaders, but they were names I never heard of. They were names that weren’t recognizable and they weren’t the big names. Some good ones, some important ones, but they weren’t the big names. I kept saying, ‘Where’s al-Baghdadi?’ ”
Is this true? An account in the Times confirmed that Trump had made the hunt for al-Baghdadi a “top priority.” But the same Times report also said that the successful raid “occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Mr. Trump’s actions.” The abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kurdish-controlled regions of Syria “disrupted the meticulous planning underway and forced Pentagon officials to speed up the plan for the risky night raid before their ability to control troops, spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared with the pullout,” officials told the Times.
In Trump’s defense, his account of his role in the planning of the raid wasn’t the most glaring falsehood he uttered during his briefing. That prize went to his assertion that, before 9/11, he wrote a book in which he singled out Osama bin Laden and said, “You have to kill him. You have to take him out.” Here is what the Associated Press’s fact checkers had to say about this statement: “His 2000 book, ‘The America We Deserve,’ makes a passing mention of bin Laden but did no more than point to the al-Qaida leader as one of many threats to U.S. security. Nor does he say in the book that bin Laden should have been killed . . . The book did not call for further U.S. action against bin Laden or al-Qaida to follow up on attacks [Bill] Clinton ordered in 1998 in Afghanistan and Sudan after al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”
You may well ask why Trump was even talking about bin Laden. It’s because he’s still obsessed with Barack Obama, of course, who presided over another successful commando raid, one in which U.S. commandos shot and killed the Al Qaeda leader. The way Trump got around this dilemma was to make out that al-Baghdadi was a bigger and badder terrorist than bin Laden. I kid you not.
The ISIS leader “is the worst ever,” Trump insisted. “Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. [Baghdadi] is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, “a country,” a caliphate, and was trying to do it again.” Moreover, it was a heck of a job to track him down, Trump emphasized. “You know, these people are very smart,” he said. “They’re not into the use of cellphones anymore . . . . They’re very technically brilliant. You know, they use the Internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump.”
In his prepared remarks on Sunday morning, he cited some of the horrible acts that ISIS has carried out and thanked the “soldiers and sailors, airmen, and marines involved in last tonight’s operation,” referring to them as “the very best there is anywhere in the world.” He also thanked General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the “professionals who work in other agencies of the United States government and were critical to the mission’s unbelievable success”—a reference to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that helped to find al-Baghdadi. Trump also thanked Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and “the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us.”
It would be easy to say that he could and should have left it there, but that wouldn’t be accurate. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have been Donald Trump. On Sunday night, the President decided to continue his victory lap with a visit to Game Five of the World Series, between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros. During his introduction, Trump was booed by fans, some of whom started to chant, “Lock him up!” Is it any wonder? Even in a moment of relief at the elimination of a sworn enemy of the United States and the West, a moment that naturally lent itself to reaching across partisan lines and beyond party politics, Trump had to make it all about himself.
