Japan to Donald Trump: nice try

| 8:08 pm EDT September 18, 2019
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Based on his ever-glowing tweets, Donald Trump appears to truly believe that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is his friend. Meanwhile back in the real world, it’s clear to everyone else that Shinzo has merely been buttering up the naively narcissist Trump in the hope of getting a favorable trade deal from him. As a reminder that Trump is in Shinzo’s pocket, and not the other away around, Japan just left Trump hanging on a key matter.

When rebels in Yemen launched a massive drone strike against Saudi Arabia and then publicly took credit for it, Donald Trump and his corrupt Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced – without evidence – that they thought Iran was actually behind it. That’s turned out to be such a tenuous position, even Saudi Arabia hasn’t been willing to accuse Iran of having been behind it.

That means Trump is in no man’s land. By all accounts he’s in the midst of trying to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, in the hope of undoing some of the damage that he did when he ripped up President Obama’ existing peace deal with Iran. By accusing Iran of the Saudi Arabia attack, and then not getting backed up by anyone, Trump is making a fool of himself – and he’s further weakening his already weak bargaining position with Iran.

Donald Trump needs someone else on the world stage to back up his baseless accusation against Iran. But Japan, which has had an ongoing dialogue with Iran for as long as Trump has been screwing things up, just announced that it can’t find any evidence that Iran was involved. If Trump was hoping that his “friend” Shinzo Abe was going to bail him out on this one by lying about an international military attack, Trump is learning the hard way that Shinzo isn’t really his friend.