Defeat ISIS

For months Donald Trump was selling his supporters on the idea that he had a foolproof way of winning the war with ISIS:

• “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing,” Trump told Fox News in May 2015.
• In a June 2015 meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board, he offered a different reason for keeping the plan under wraps — that his opponents would steal it.
• in an April 2016 foreign policy speech: he told ISIS their days are numbered and “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.”

Trump would also make the audacious assertion that he “knew more about ISIS than the generals do.” Even after repeatedly making the ridiculously false claim that President Obama founded ISIS, we were to still “believe him.”

About the Plan

At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on September 6th, 2016, Trump finally released his long secret plan. The Republican candidate said that on day one of his presidency, he would convene his top generals and give what he called a “simple instruction” to in 30 days submit to the Oval Office “a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.”

…that’s it…

No really, here it is in its entirety. All 15 seconds of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXAxgeILn2o

Reality

This whole time Republican candidate Donald Trump’s foolproof super-secret plan was to… ask someone else? And not just anyone, he would ask the same generals who he said “failed” and who “don’t know much because they’re not winning” to produce a solution for him.

He was right about one thing; unpredictability. Not one person in the media or any single defense expert could have predicted a response this disappointing.

We can’t even review Trump’s plan to defeat ISIS because a plan would first have to exist.