West Wing Reads

President Trump Announces Death of ISIS Leader in US Raid “Last night, the United States brought the world’s Number One terrorist leader to justice,” President Donald J. Trump said yesterday from the East Room of the White House.   “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.”   The terrorist leader’s “death represents a significant symbolic victory in the battle against the terror group and marks the end of a years-long effort to track down the elusive ISIS leader, who had been reported killed multiple times in the past,” Morgan Chalfant reports for The Hill. “Trump declared that al-Baghdadi’s death demonstrated the United States's ‘relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.’”   Click here to read more.

On Sunday, the parents of Kayla Mueller, who was taken hostage by al-Baghdadi in 2013 and killed 18 months later, praised President Trump and the soldiers who completed this mission, Karina Bland writes in The Arizona Republic. “I still say Kayla should be here, and if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been," Marsha Mueller said.

“On Sunday morning, The Washington Post seemingly struggled to come up with a headline for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s obituary,” Ashe Schow writes in The Daily Wire.  “Just imagine the Post claiming Osama bin Laden was an ‘austere religious scholar.’ You can’t, because that’s not how the Post described him after the raid that killed him during the Obama Administration … Yet when the leader of a terrorist organization dies under President Donald Trump, the word ‘terrorist’ gets removed.”

“A week after he was inaugurated, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 3, which mandated an updated campaign plan against ISIS within 30 days,” Peter Bergen writes for CNN. The President deserves credit for giving “his military commanders the authority for taking action against ISIS so they were no longer micromanaged by the White House, as was often the case under Obama.”

“The S&P 500 hit a record high on Monday, breaking above an all-time high set over the summer as investors cheered strong earnings and progress on U.S.-China trade,” Fred Imbert reports for CNBC.