Why we need to be able to trust our President

For 200 years, our country has built a reputation of trust.  When we committed to support our allies, they could take that to the bank.  This week, President Trump abandoned our Kurdish Allies and left them to die unprotected.   AND TODAY, SOME OF THEM DIED.  This is not a petty tweet insulting someone.   This is not “Trump being Trump”.   These Kurds put everything on the line to help us defeat ISIS.  AND WE LEFT THEM TO DIE when we no longer needed them.   200 years of our hard-earned reputation of trust – trust earned with the blood of millions of Americans – has been shattered by the disgraceful act of a despicable man.

The situation in Syria between the Kurds and Turkey appears to be more complicated than most people realize.   Both Turkey and the Kurds have worked with us to defeat ISIS.  There are many factions in the middle east that hate each other, and allegiances seem to shift often.  The presence of U.S. forces in the area not only helps in the fight against ISIS, but helps keep the peace between our allies as well.  In this case, it appears that the presence of only around 100 U.S. troops was what was preventing Turkey from attacking the Kurds.

Perhaps there was a good reason for his actions. Maybe some top-secret intelligence that we, the public, do not have access to made this decision necessary. This is why it is so important to have a President that we can trust.  Because he has access to the intelligence, we depend on him to properly understand it and make the correct decisions.   Ordinary U.S. citizens do not have access to the intelligence needed to fully understand the situation, let alone be able to make the proper decisions on how to deploy our military and/or diplomatic corps. 

But Donald Trump has proven himself to be untrustworthy and unfit.  While many of his lies, tweets, and actions are petty and relatively harmless, or even designed just to troll the media and his distractors, their cumulative effect is to destroy the public’s trust that we must have in our president. 

If we can’t believe what he says about easily verifiable facts, how can we be expected to believe him about matters of grave concern, such as this week’s decision to abandon our allies in Syria?