After Trump, the reckoning

As voters prepare to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency in November, they might want to entertain a few counterfactuals. Imagine that Russia had annexed Crimea during the Trump years rather than while Obama was president. MSNBC and other left-wing media would have hawked claims that Trump actively conspired with Putin to let the Russian president dismember Ukraine. More sober outlets, some of them ‘conservative’, would have chalked up the loss of Crimea to president Trump’s basic incompetence and reckless defiance of the foreign-policy establishment.

Much the same narrative web would have been spun if, say, Otto Warmbier had been imprisoned by Kim Jong-un’s regime this year rather than in the last year of the Obama administration. The story would have been all about Trump and his characteristic faults, though we know from the way that history really did happen that these things were the fault of Obama and the foreign-policy establishment — the very entities the media holds up as paragons of excellence in contrast to Trump.