Trump praises UK arrests, says he 'wouldn't have' released the same suspects one day later.

…(cont) This isn't the first time somebody in this story got ahead of the facts. Before a single one of the five had been charged with anything, a Republican congresswoman had already put Iran's name on the plot. That didn't hold either — the five turned out to be exactly what British police said they were, UK nationals, nothing more exotic. One politician rushed to blame a foreign enemy before the facts existed; another rushed to condemn an ally's due process after the facts hadn't changed. Both moves ran on the same empty paper.

Look at what the administration was bragging about eighteen days earlier. On September 10th, ahead of the 9/11 anniversary, Homeland Security put out its own terrorism arithmetic: ICE had arrested more than 2,150 "known or suspected terrorists" and deported over 2,000 of them. Big round numbers, no case files a reporter could pull one at a time. That's the same government that looked at a British police department doing exactly what due process requires — investigate, arrest, release without evidence — and decided the problem was too much restraint.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Six days before the Fairford arrests, a Reuters poll put Trump's approval at 32 percent, a record low for either of his two terms, the worst number of his political career. A president that far underwater doesn't get to just watch the news anymore. He has to be in it, correcting it, tougher than the actual facts allow, one flip at a time. London did the police work. Washington did the performance. Only one of those required an arrest.