There are undoubtedly parts of any Donald Trump presidency that are unique to him, but there are also parts that are continuous with other presidents, and one problem the media has is that they freak out over both. New York Times columnist David Brooks did precisely that on Friday’s PBS News Hour as he gave a factually-challenged retort to Trump’s speech in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where he expressed his Middle East policy would be guided by pragmatism and not high-minded idealism or moral lecturing.
Brooks lamented, “That was a speech in which he defined his foreign policy. And he basically — all of American history, at least since postwar, is like, we care about democracy. We don't like it if you're throwing people off roofs. Like, we don't like it if you're murdering journalists. Like, we don't like that stuff. And that was partly realpolitik, the idea that tyrants are more likely to be expansionist and destabilizing, but also who we are as Americans. Like, we do have a moral foreign policy.”
He continued, “And the two key pieces of the Trump speech were, we're not going to tell you how you run your country. You want to blow off some journalists you don't like, that's your business. And the second was we're not in the nation-building business anymore. We're just staying out. And that's a pretty sharp reversal of what had been 100 years of bipartisan foreign policy.”
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