Analysis: Trump calls Iranian shootdown of Navy drone a 'fly in the ointment,' leaving critics mystified
WASHINGTON — When Donald Trump ran for the White House in 2016, he blamed previous presidents for sending U.S. troops into endless, grinding wars, and vowed to stay out of foreign conflicts.
This week, he twice showed he meant it. On Monday, he dismissed explosions aboard two oil tankers that the U.S. had blamed on Iran as “very minor.” And on Thursday he shrugged off a more serious provocation, a predawn Iranian missile strike that downed a high-flying U.S. Navy surveillance drone.
While he could still order retaliation, Trump initially sounded unruffled, calling the Iranian ground-to-air missile launch an inadvertent error by a rogue unit or general, someone “loose and stupid,” rather than a dramatic attack that might require a U.S. military response.
“I find it hard to believe it was intentional,” Trump said, despite a boast by Iran’s foreign minister that Iranian forces had deliberately shot down the Global Hawk for, in his telling, violating Iranian airspace. The Pentagon denied that, insisting the drone was over international waters.
“I imagine someone made a mistake,” Trump said. Instead of staying that Iran had gone too far, he dismissed the attack as “a new wrinkle, a new fly in the ointment.”
It was the latest case of Trump giving a selectively optimistic interpretation of unsettling events and giving hostile foreign leaders the benefit of the doubt.
