“The beginning of wisdom,” Confucius said, “is to call things by their proper name.” Donald Trump’s aphorisms are unlikely to make their way into fortune cookies, much less to go down in history, but on this point he and the great Chinese sage would seem to agree.
In the wake of Omar Mateen’s massacre of 49 people and wounding of 53 others at Orlando’s gay nightclub Pulse in early June, America’s best-known tweeting politician (at least since Hillary Clinton’s personal assistant Huma Abedin took husband Anthony Weiner’s virtual Kodachrome away) demanded that President Barack Obama call a spade a spade, and a terrorist act the work of “radical Islam.” Despite the fact that the Obama administration has simply continued the policy of the Bush administration on avoiding this term, Trump’s barbs clearly got under President Obama’s skin, and while he could not bring himself to call Donald Trump by his proper name, he did manage to utter “radical Islam” while dismissing these as “magic words” demanded by “politicians who tweet.” Policies, he said, were more important than incantations, before going on to defend his administration’s policies, which had done nothing to prevent the latest terrorist attack on American soil.
I rarely find myself in agreement with Barack Obama, much less with...