Don’t take Trump’s bait on Baghdadi

| 12:49 am EDT October 27, 2019
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Late on Saturday night, Donald Trump tweeted “Something very big has just happened!” Based on the media reports that have since surfaced, Trump is planning to announce on Sunday morning that he ordered a U.S. military operation that took out ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That’s fascinating, considering that by most accounts, Baghdadi has already been dead for years.

We’ll see what Trump ends up spewing in the morning, and we’ll see if there’s any evidence to back up whatever rabbit-from-a-hat claims he’s about to make. By all accounts Baghdadi hasn’t been calling the shots within ISIS for years (part of why so many observers think he died awhile ago), and if he had been hiding out in northern Syria all this time, then he definitely hasn’t been calling the shots. Considering the huge number of ISIS prisoners who were recently set free by Trump’s suspect military moves, and this is a wash at best for America’s security.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter anyway. The media will spent the next thirty-six hours focused on the Baghdadi story, until it sees that no one outside Trump’s base gives a damn about the announcement of the death of a little-known ISIS leader who has already been out of commission for years, and then the media will go back to covering Trump’s impeachment.

The real story this weekend is that Donald Trump’s own guy Gordon Sondland announced through his attorney on Saturday night that he testified to the House impeachment inquiry that Trump was running a quid pro quo in Ukraine. Apparently Sondland was scared enough to tell the truth about Trump, and now he’s leaking it in an apparent effort at saving himself. Come Monday, the media will place its focus back where it belongs: the takedown of a domestic terrorist named Donald Trump. His impeachment will advance unabated, and his presidency will continue to collapse.