Things Not Everyone Knows: Trump and National Security

Hopefully, Trump's supporters and opponents alike can agree that Trump has no idea how to be the President.  Outside of scamming money from his customers and business associates, he seems not to know much of anything.

After all, he nearly let Ted Cruz snatch the Republican nomination from him because neither he nor his advisers bothered to learn the rules of the game.  Real Clear Politics, no tool of the 'liberal media', characterized Trump as aggresively ignorant.  His plan to deal with the federal debt is widely recognized as something which would destabilize the world economy.  He didn't know what Brexit was just days before the vote, and the day after it passed, he tweeted from Scotland about how the passage meant the people there "took their country back", despite the fact that Scotland voted to remain in the EU by a 62-38 margin and despite the fact that Brexit's passage will likely result in the dissolution of the UK.  Trump and his campaign clearly don't know anything about U.S. election law, either, since they've been illegally spamming foreign parliaments with fundraising emails.

Evan Trump's campaign chair Paul Manafort told "Meet the Press" last Sunday that Trump "doesn’t need to figure out what’s going on in order to say what he wants to do."  If Trump's campaign manager can admit on national TV that Trump doesn't know what's going on, then hopefully his supporters will concede that point as well.

So I have to ask the Trump supporters: Why would you want a president who knows nothing about the job, and clearly isn't interested in learning how to do the job?  Would you hire someone to build your house if they know nothing about carpentry, electrical wiring, or plumbing?  Would you let someone remove your appendix without medical training?  And if so, could you please schedule the surgery to take place before the election?

It's hard to understand why Trump's supporters are so excited to vote for someone so willfully ignorant.  Many of them aparently find Trump's lack of political correctness refreshing; I've already explained why that's a really stupid reason to vote for someone to be president.  Another reason, apparently, is because a lot of them believe that Trump is the right candidate to defeat ISIS.

But if ending global terrorism were easy to do, it would already be ended.  It's really, really hard to protect innocent people from someone who is willing to blow himself up.  And not only is Trump clueless about fighting terrorism, his position of wanting to ban Muslims from the country and engage in torture is actually helping ISIS to recruit new members.

Of course, when it comes to fighting terrorism, I don't know anything, either.  Neither do most (or all) of Trump's supporters.  So maybe --- just maybe --- we should listen to people who actually know what they're talking about.  Back in March, 121 Republican national security professionals wrote an open letter explaining why they believe a Trump presidency would make America less safe, including the facts that "He is fundamentally dishonest" and "His embrace of the expansive use of torture is inexcusable".

So if you're a Trump supporter, and you actually care about keeping our country safe, you should read this letter, and recognize that these 121 people know more about national security than you or me, or Donald Trump.  And then you should reconsider why exactly you plan to vote for him.