Trump just lazily tried to force a foreign nation to do his bidding by tweet

Before Donald Trump became president and undermined the world diplomatic order by reversing decades of American foreign policy, the State Department professionals with a perspective on our national goals and a knowledge of international protocol would normally handle U.S. relations with foreign countries.

In the Trump administration, however, diplomacy now often consists of a tweet from the president after having been told by Fox & Friends what he should think about the pressing foreign crisis of the day.

President Trump took a short break from his non-stop tweeting of denials of collusion and of attacks on Democrats still seeking to see the full Special Counsel’s report — that is reported by leakers on Robert Mueller’s team to be much more critical of the president than his Attorney General’s Summary would indicate — to weigh in on the kidnappers of a recently freed American tourist and her guide at a national park in Uganda.

Kim Endicott and her Ugandan driver were both safely returned by their kidnappers this weekend after being abducted in Queen Elizabeth National Park and sequestered across the nearby Congolese border with a demand of half a million dollars in ransom for their release.

While Ugandan police deny that a ransom had been paid, the organizers of the tour company through which Endicott had hired her driver insisted that the kidnappers were paid to obtain their release, according to an account in The Washington Post.

“Otherwise she wouldn’t be back,” said the representative from Wild Frontiers Uganda Safaris,

If President Trump had bothered checking the Twitter feed of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, he could have saved himself the trouble of sending his own tweet about the incident, since Museveni had already addressed Trump’s concerns hours earlier.

Trump’s attempt at Twitter diplomacy was an appealing target for his critics who mocked the president’s penchant for live-tweeting Fox News like a senile old man sitting on his living room couch and for his hypocrisy in advising tourists to avoid the African nation while failing to make the same warning towards other, equally dangerous but more personally profitable, nations.

https://twitter.com/bucgirl2/status/1115228646841769984

The best reply, however, was the one that turned Trump’s own language against him by pointing out the absurdity of his comments given his own track record as the abductor of thousands of refugee immigrant children.

While at least one of those American kidnappers should be fairly easy to find since he has a predictable pattern of visiting a Trump-owned golf course every weekend, the release of former Homeland Security Department Secretary Kristjen Nielsen yesterday from the confines of the office where she planned the illegal abductions and family separations makes her whereabouts more difficult to pin down.

No one in America should feel safe until those two and their accomplices — we’re looking at you, Stephen Miller —are safely locked away for good.

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Original reporting by Travis Gettys at RawStory and by Rodney Muhumuza at The Washington Post.

Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.