The Washington Post has a story today about Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders which routinely horrify his aides. Allow me to digest the article; they ain’t perfect.
Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance, or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.
He is dismissive to female heads of state, sucks up to autocrats and generally humiliates us as citizens of the United States even more than we see in public. In other words, if you are already cringing on what he represents to the world, it’s much worse.
As you would suspect, he fawns over Vlad. He even asks for his advice on how to make friends with other autocrats.
In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner…
And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.
He complimented the Phillipines’ Rodrigo Duterte on his brutal extralegal slaughter of suspected “drug traffickers” ( which could be anyone, particularly a political opponent).
In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”
His defense of Putin and rudeness to females converged last year.
Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women.
In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.
“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”
In addition, he is simply unprepared and undisciplined in his conversations, roaming from any coherent point that might come from reading intelligence reports, listening to experts and doing the work a person in such high office would be expected to do.
Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.
“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said.
Trump is trashing our reputation in the world, on phone call at a time. Oh, but he has his defenders.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.
“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”
Oh, sure Lindsey, if a “normal person” is an ignorant, sociopathic, would be dictator.