Trump paints democratic opponents as Iranian stooges

PTI, Jan 14, 2020, 9:55 AM IST

Washington: President Donald Trump on Monday painted his Democratic opponents as pro-Iranian stooges and retweeted a faked picture of two top party leaders in Muslim garb.

Trump’s latest assault on the senior Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer and House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi followed criticism of his ordering a deadly drone strike against a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.

“Anything I do, whether it’s the economy, military, or anything else, will be scorned by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats!” Trump fumed on Twitter, misspelling “Radical.” Earlier, he retweeted a photoshopped picture depicting Pelosi in a hijab and Schumer wearing a turban.

The US killing of Soleimani near the airport in the Iraqi capital Baghdad has stoked fears of war across the region. Trump insists that Soleimani had to be killed to prevent an imminent attack on four US embassies.

However, senior administration officials have given varied accounts, leading Democrats to question the whole episode, which comes on the eve of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate.

In his Monday tweets, Trump claimed the Democrats and what he calls “the Fake News” media were “trying to make terrorist Soleimani into a wonderful guy, only because I did what should have been done for 20 years.”

Responding to criticism that he was reckless in ordering the killing of Soleimani by some counts the second most important figure in the entire Iranian government Trump again insisted that there’d been an imminent threat.

But he also hedged his words, adding that even without an immediate threat requiring such a high-profile attack, Soleimani’s past justified the action.

“The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was ’eminent’ or not, & was my team in agreement,” Trump tweeted, misspelling “imminent.”

“The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!” Last week, Trump told a reelection campaign rally that Pelosi and other Democrats could not be trusted with classified information in cases like the killing of Soleimani.