Duckworth blasts Trump on Senate floor
‘My diaper-wearing 20-month-old has better impulse control than this president,’ says war hero
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth speaks on the Senate floor Wednesday, saying, “My diaper-wearing 20-month-old has better impulse control than this president.” (YouTube)
By Ted Cox
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Purple Heart recipient from the loss of her legs in battle in Iraq, blistered President Trump on the Senate floor Wednesday in response to his brinksmanship in the Middle East.
Duckworth charged in no uncertain terms that “he’s given Iran everything they could’ve asked for” with last week’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani by drone strike in Iraq, which she said had united U.S. opposition in both nations.
The first serving senator ever to bring her baby to the Senate floor shamed Trump by saying, “My diaper-wearing 20-month-old has better impulse control than this president.”
The state’s junior U.S. senator spoke for 11 minutes, beginning by quoting Trump’s tweet, “All is well,” after Iran launched dozens of missiles at U.S. military bases in Iraq Tuesday evening, but produced no casualties.
Duckworth said the issue went far deeper than that near miss. “Donald Trump never deigned to put on the uniform, using his money to buy his way out of military service when his country needed him during Vietnam,” she said, “so let me make something clear to him — all is certainly not well when war is on the horizon just because you wanted to look like the toughest kid on the playground. I’m incredibly thankful that no Americans were killed last night in Iran’s rebuttal attack. But some missed missiles should be no cause for celebration for Donald Trump. Just because there weren’t fatalities yesterday doesn’t mean there won’t be any tragedies tomorrow.”
Duckworth said that she saw public opposition to Iran when she served in Iraq in 2004. “Young Iraqis spoke out against Iran while I was back in the country last spring,” she added, and “protests roiled as recently as last month, when tens of thousands of Iraqis flooded the streets, raising voices and picket signs, demanding that their government crawl out from under Iran’s thumb.
“Now, after Donald Trump decided to kill Maj. General Qasem Soleimani on sovereign Baghdad soil, those same streets are filled with protesters once more. Yet this time they’re marching in solidarity with the enemy that hundreds of Iraqis died marching against just a few short weeks ago. With one choice, Donald Trump squandered the opportunity that existed to push for greater democracy and stability in the region. In one fell swoop, he somehow managed to villainize the U.S. and victimize Iran, isolating us from our longterm partner in Iraq and amping up Iran’s influence in a country everyone knows is vital to our security interests throughout the Middle East.”
Duckworth accused Trump of being goaded into the attack on Soleimani. “Look, Iran didn’t want Trump to kill Soleimani,” she said. “But they were hungry for all that’s happened as a result. They were starving to go on the offensive, desperate to change the narrative, to swing public opinion and solidify their power in Iraq, to have a new excuse to attack anyone with an American flag on their shoulder, and to shrug off the restraints of the nuclear deal.
“We used to have the Monroe Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine. Now, we have the Trump Doctrine, in which the leader of the free world, the commander-in-chief of the greatest fighting force ever assembled, gets manipulated again and again by the dictators of hostile regimes.
“We’ve seen him get manipulated by tyrants in Pyongyang and Riyadh, subjugated by despots in Moscow and Ankara, as our allies laugh — literally laugh — at him behind his back. All these dictators have realized the same thing: the President of the United States is as easy to control as a toddler. Sweet-talk him or thump your chest and issue a few schoolyard threats, and you’ve got him. He’ll fall for it every time, doing your bidding as if it’s his own.
“I wish this weren’t true,” Duckworth added, “but my diaper-wearing 20-month-old has better impulse control than this president.”
Duckworth accused Trump of “incompetence” and being “gullible” and said he had put U.S. troops at additional risk in what is already a war zone. She concluded by making the case that Congress must reassert its control over the right to declare war.
“We need to exert our constitutional control over this out-of-control toddler-in-chief, and vote to prevent him from entangling us in another major war without legal authorization from Congress,” Duckworth said. “Because if we truly want to honor our heroes in uniform, we wouldn’t send them into harm’s way without a clear-eyed discussion of the mission we’re asking them to carry out and the consequences for both them and our nation. Yet so far, Trump hasn’t even managed that.” Calling Trump a “five-deferment draft dodger,” she added, “Having never sacrificed much himself, he doesn’t understand our troops’ sacrifices. Having never really served anything other than his own self-interest, he doesn’t give a second thought to their service.
“Donald Trump will never willingly cut the puppet strings that the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are using to make him dance,” Duckworth concluded. “We need a strong majority in the Senate to force such action. Until then, small-time dictators will continue to have access to the world’s most powerful marionette, and we will all suffer the consequences.”
On Thursday, the U.S. House voted along party lines, 224-194, to approve the War Powers Resolution, reasserting the right of Congress and not the president to declare war with Iran. The measure faced uncertain prospects in the Senate, although two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, were highly critical of a Trump administration briefing Wednesday attempting to lay out the rationale for the the attack on Soleimani. Lee called the briefing “insulting and demeaning” and said it was “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate.”
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Channahon, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who continues to serve in the Air National Guard, defended Trump’s actions. Over the weekend, he told National Public Radio he thought the attack on Soleimani was “the right move,” and on Thursday he called on Americans to support the military, saying it’s no time for political bias or posturing.