Tomgram: John Feffer, The Jaws Presidency | TomDispatch

After sixty years of lecturing the world about human rights, setting up an America-centered international order, and invading the dissenters and deviants Barack Obama brought hope of change.  After a string of presidential "doctrines" the ridiculed Obama "don't do stupid shit" byword was a real step forward.

Nonetheless Obama, understandably saw it as impossible to just walk away from the debacle of our Iraw war of aggression, or from our initially plausible, ultimately hopeless intervention in Afghanistan.

So when Trump succeeded Obama our Afghan clients were still on the ropes, and the ISIS monster raged in the tinder dry cities of our catastrophic "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Now we have the Flight 93 Presidency.  Headed to crash and burn in yet undetermined fields or cities.  - gwc
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Jaws Presidency | TomDispatch

***Although Trump’s approach to global affairs seems to have no particular rhyme or reason, it does have a certain rhythm. It has an insistent, urgent beat, something like the notorious two-note theme of the movie Jaws. The president not only wants you to believe that the world is a dangerous place, but that those dangers are approaching at a terrifying pace. Only Trump, he would have you believe, can save you from those sharp teeth inches from your throat.

Let’s call this approach Trump’s Flight 93 doctrine, after an infamous article, “The Flight 93 Election,” published in September 2016 in the far-right Claremont Review. According to its pseudonymous author, later revealed to be former George W. Bush administration staffer Michael Anton, liberals like Hillary Clinton were piloting America into catastrophe, aided, electorally, by “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Only Donald Trump and his conservative backers -- like the heroes who charged the cockpit of hijacked United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 -- could avert such a tragedy. “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi-auto,” Anton wrote. “With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

The analogy is, unfortunately, all too apt. Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. It was heroism, yes, but at a very steep price. And playing Russian roulette with any kind of weapon rarely ends well.

No surprise, then, that, as the president spins the cylinder of the gun pressed to all our heads, the Trump Doctrine of non-stop risk-taking has turned out to be the most self-defeating approach ever adopted by a modern American president. In fact, it may turn out to be the last doctrine that the White House ever has the luxury to formulate.