Apparently shocked and saddened by Thursday night’s breaking news that President Trump tested positive for COVID-19, leftist media hosts began seeking some sort of silver lining in which to take comfort. On Friday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough and his guest, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, were fortunately able to find something positive in light of the diagnosis—the government will be better off with Tr
ump being sick.
Ghoulishly speculating about what challenges the nation could face as the President’s health is called into question, Scarborough’s thoughts turned to U.S. foreign policy: “I’m curious what, if the President is staying in bed, is recovering and not actively working, what does the foreign policy—what should our foreign policy apparatus do? What does that look like in situations like this?”
Ignatius was able to assure him that American intelligence and military communications would be just fine without constant supervision from the White House, as they are on “autopilot” and generally run themselves. In a further effort to alleviate Scarborough’s concern, Ignatius even insinuated that these operations might even be better off without Trump’s supervision: “Sometimes President Trump has seemed almost to want to disrupt them, resent them, but he has not succeeded, and they’re still there.” Thank goodness the Commander-in-Chief succumbed to the coronavirus before he managed to sabotage the U.S. military and intelligence network.
Ignatius concluded by saying that the president must stay away from Twitter while in recovery. Scarborough agreed, sharing more insight into federal agencies that he learned from reading Bob Woodward’s Trump-trashing book:
…what you find often with our foreign policy apparatus at least over the first three and a half years of the Trump presidency, you have people who are operating and working their agencies, trying to do their best not to have their work disrupted by a tweet or by an angry call from the White House. So perhaps the foreign policy apparatus is in [a] pretty good position right now because they have-- it’s ironic, but because there hasn’t been a good interagency process in this administration, they have had to learn to operate the State Department and other agencies, the intelligence agencies, on their own without a lot of interference from the White House.
Partisan hacks in the press everywhere are trying to console themselves with the notion that their least favorite president will hopefully be too sick to meddle in government affairs. This is what craven “journalists” are rooting for right now.
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Read the transcript below:
Morning Joe
10/2/20
8:27:54 AM
JOE SCARBOROUGH: David Ignatius, we talked about this briefly before, but again, we obviously, as a country, face many threats daily. I'm curious what, if the president is staying in bed, is recovering and not actively working, what does the foreign policy -- what should our foreign policy apparatus do? What does that look like in situations like this?
DAVID IGNATIUS [WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST]: Joe, the basic machinery runs, I want to say, on autopilot. Obviously, a lot of effort in directing it, but our military around the globe in constant communication through satellite connections, combatant commands that look at every area of crisis, our intelligence agencies are unique in the world. There are simply nothing like the American spread of sensors, collection technology, that never stops and it won't now. So all those fundamentals of our strength continue. Sometimes President Trump has seemed almost to want to disrupt them, resent them, but he has not succeeded, and they're still there. It's interesting to me that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been more aggressive recently in some policies that initially the president probably was a little bit skeptical about. Mike Pompeo has gotten very concerned about Turkey, and Turkey's expansionist disruptive policies in the Middle East, the war that’s going on between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Pompeo has taken a more forward leaning position. He was just in Greece doing interesting diplomacy with Greece. Although it wasn’t widely recognized yesterday, the United States, Russia, and France jointly moved in a common diplomatic effort to stop the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. That's a very unusual thing for the U.S. to be cooperating so closely with Russia. That was something that was managed by Pompeo, it will be ongoing, so I think people shouldn't worry that suddenly with Trump gone our national security machinery stops working. It doesn't -- it's not built that way, and that won't happen. There is a question that I would ask. This is a president who just, you know if a day goes by where he hasn't tweeted, intervened, done something, seems to get upset. And will his doctors -- will his good sense say, you have to get over this disease? You have to stop trying to run the world by Twitter. And so I would keep an eye on that. If he's tweeting a lot, you would say boy, that's not what he needs to be doing right now. He needs to be getting well. So he's got a campaign to finish among other things.
SCARBOROUGH: Alright, David Ignatius, greatly appreciate you being with us. And yes, let's hope the president rests and recovers. It is interesting, Willie, that if you read Bob Woodward's book, what you find often with our foreign policy apparatus at least over the first three and a half years of the Trump presidency, you have people who are operating and working their agencies, trying to do their best to not have their work disrupted by a tweet or by an angry call from the White House. So perhaps the foreign policy apparatus is in [a] pretty good position right now because they have -- it's ironic, but because there hasn't been a good interagency process in this administration, they have had to learn to operate the State Department and other agencies, the intelligence agencies, on their own without a lot of interference from the White House.
