After having spent the year saying effectively nothing about conditions in Nigeria, Donald Trump expressed sudden and dramatic interest in the African country late last week. The president, pointing to alleged attacks against the nation’s Christian population, announced via his social media platform that he was labeling Nigeria a “country of particular concern.”
A day later, the Republican went considerably further, threatening to send U.S. troops into the country, “guns-a-blazing,” as part of a military offensive that he said would be “fast, vicious, and sweet.” The day after that, the president fielded a few questions from reporters aboard Air Force One and again raised the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Nigeria.
There’s no shortage of questions about what, if anything, might come of the saber-rattling, but there’s a related question that’s lingered in the background: How, exactly, did this issue come to Trump’s attention?
In a normal White House, one might assume that a president might learn about conditions in Nigeria by way of a Presidential Daily Brief, but Trump doesn’t read those. One might assume that such information would be included as part of an intelligence briefing, but Trump skips those, too.
So how did this get on Trump’s radar? NBC News reported:
A Fox News report prompted President Donald Trump to call out Nigeria over the killing of Christians and then threaten military action, setting off a scramble in the White House over the weekend, according to multiple U.S. officials. It’s still unclear what — if anything — the administration will do to counter Islamic militants in Nigeria, but precision drone strikes are among the preliminary options being considered, two U.S. officials said.
This reminded me of a story from almost eight years ago.
In January 2018, roughly a year into Trump’s first term, he raised eyebrows around the world by publishing an online item in which he boasted about the size of his “nuclear button,” effectively daring North Korea to demonstrate its nuclear capabilities. At the time, the Republican’s tweet began, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’”
But the North Korean leader hadn’t “just” stated that; he’d actually made the comments days earlier. What had actually “just” happened was that Fox News had aired a segment on Kim’s comments, and Trump had “just” seen that.
Around the same time, the president sat down with a New York Times reporter and pointed to evidence of China providing oil to North Korea. Did he receive this information from a U.S. intelligence agency? No, Trump said he knew the information was true because “it was reported on Fox.”
The same day, he said his approval rating at the end of his first year was “the same” as Barack Obama’s. That was spectacularly untrue, but Trump said he saw it reported on Fox News.
Months earlier, he told the public about terrorist violence in Sweden — which, as it turned out, didn’t actually exist — because of something he saw on Fox News. Around the same time, White House aides conceded that the network was Trump’s “primary source of information gathering.” Several years later, very little has changed. The public may not fully appreciate just how quickly a sitting president can have any question answered. Trump can pick up the phone anytime and request information on any topic. Knowledgeable officials then prepare a detailed briefing and answer his questions in any level of detail he finds satisfying. But the incumbent president doesn’t want to pick up the phone, he wants to pick up his remote. This was true to an unsettling degree in his first term, and the Nigeria story suggests it’s still true now. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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