Although not all of the relevant details are yet clear, according to U.S. Central Command, an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed off the coast of Oman; the two crew members on board were rescued and are now in stable condition. Whether the incident was the result of a deliberate Iranian attack is the subject of some debate.
One day after the developments, Donald Trump spoke to The Wall Street Journal and downplayed the importance of the incident. In fact, according to the Journal, the president “repeatedly” said the downing of the helicopter “wasn’t a big deal.” Hours later, the Republican did a 180-degree turn, decided it was a very big deal after all, and approved a new military offensive against Iranian targets.
Trump offered additional insights on his perspective with a pop culture reference that he didn’t appear to fully understand. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday night appeared to defend his latest military strikes on Iran by posting a short clip from “The West Wing,” the popular NBC television drama about a fictional U.S. president, in which the show’s characters debate their own military action.
In the video Trump promoted on his social media platform, he referred to an episode from the show’s first season in which Syria downed a U.S. military plane. The clip, which ran about a minute and a half, showed the fictional American president in the White House Situation Room, expressing his dissatisfaction with the idea of a “proportional response.”
Voicing support for a “disproportional response,” the fictional president declares, “Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, gentlemen — you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster.”
This evidently resonated with Trump, who promoted the excerpt late Tuesday. What the incumbent president neglected to do, however, is to watch the rest of the episode.
In the show, the president eventually concedes his initial reaction was reckless and overly emotional, and that the kind of “disproportional response” he initially envisioned would lead to civilian casualties. Indeed, the whole point of the episode was that responsible global superpowers reject the very idea of a “disproportional response.”
Trump, in other words, got it backward.
It wasn’t the first time. Exactly one year ago, my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown noted that Trump had touted “Les Misérables” while clearly missing the point of the production. A month earlier, the Republican tried to have a little fun with “Star Wars” day, but he inadvertently promoted an image that presented him as a villain.
These weren’t isolated incidents. In 2019, for example, the Republican White House tried to use “Game of Thrones” as part of a clumsy argument about the president’s border wall project, and the whole thing fell apart rather quickly. A year later, Trump talked about the Capt. William Bligh character from “Mutiny on the Bounty,” though it wasn’t altogether clear whether the president realized that Bligh is the villain of that story.
After his defeat in 2020, Trump talked obsessively about fictional character Hannibal Lecter, including a weird instance in which he referred to the infamous cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs” as “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and “a wonderful man.”
Maybe the president should just steer clear of making pop culture references? He’s clearly not good at it.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Still struggling with pop culture, Trump whiffs on point of ‘West Wing’ clip appeared first on MS NOW.
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