The First and Only Response to Trump’s Airstrikes Should Be: Let the Refugees In
April 7, 2017
Provoked, he says, by televised images of children dying in a gas attack ordered by Bashar al-Assad, Donald Trump launched a missile strike against a Syrian airfield on Thursday night. Politicians who are almost always critical of Trump (most prominently Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi) have reacted by praising the strike as morally righteous; media outlets that have had an adversarial relationship with the president (CNN, the New York Times) have respectfully saturation-covered his decision as the Big Moment of a Serious Leader.
There is an instinctive pattern in American media and politics—one that seemed less obviously objectionable during the relatively nondisastrous small-scale interventions of the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years—that this is how one treats an American military attack: as a BREAKING moment of Kennedy assassination–esque national solidarity and urgency that is of interest primarily for the way it reflects the firm moral resolve of the president who ordered it.
