With a nod to the publishing team at TomDispatch, this week StratDem takes another look at a subject rarely visited as blood and treasure are drawn and a nation’s health and resources are taxed beyond reason. Echoes of a “delicious” chocolate cake and an infamous line delivered at the Mar-a-Lago “club”. We’ve launched an attack …
Wilbur Ross put the matter… well, mouth-wateringly. At a Milken Institute Global Conference in California, the commerce secretary recalled how President Trump was hosting a dinner for China’s president, Xi Jinping, at his Mar-a-Lago club at the moment when a bevy of Tomahawk missiles were being dispatched against an airfield in Syria. Ross described the moment this way: “Just as dessert was being served, the president explained to Mr. Xi he had something he wanted to tell him, which was the launching of 59 missiles into Syria. It was in lieu of after-dinner entertainment.” To laughter from the crowd, he then added, “The thing was, it didn’t cost the president anything to have that entertainment.”
The president himself recalled the same moment in an interview with Fox Business: “I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen, and President Xi was enjoying it.”
“So what happens is I said, ‘We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to (sic) Iraq, and I wanted you to know this,'” Trump continued in the Fox interview.
“And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.”
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