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ON FRIDAY, AS HE RETURNED to the United States from a four-day tour of the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump berated Bruce Springsteen for criticizing him on foreign soil. “I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Trump fumed on Truth Social. Out of respect for America, Trump wrote, Springsteen “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country.”
Trump’s indignation was comically insincere. His whole trip to the Gulf was about badmouthing America and renouncing American values.
A normal American president might have used such a trip to reaffirm our nation’s enduring relationships with the host countries. Instead, Trump portrayed himself as the essential link. In Qatar, he said the U.S.-Saudi partnership was strong “because of my relationship with the crown prince and the family.” That’s how a monarch thinks: Bonds between countries are really just bonds between the ruling families.
A normal president might have emphasized the continuity of America’s commitments across parties and administrations. Instead, Trump belittled and spurned previous American presidents. He subjected Saudi and Qatari audiences to bizarre rants about how badly he had supposedly trounced his domestic opponents in the 2024 election (fact check: he won, but it wasn’t a trouncing), including details about how many states, counties, and electoral votes he had won. “It was an obliteration,” he crowed.
In Saudi Arabia, Trump derided Joe Biden. The Iranians “laughed at him,” Trump jeered, “and they’re still laughing at our leader. They thought him a fool.” At a business roundtable in Qatar, Trump called Biden “a man that couldn’t even stand up, he was so terrible.” He said Biden had made America “a laughingstock.”
Trump also scorned George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “We had a president that blew up half the Middle East, and then he left,” Trump told the business audience in Qatar, apparently conflating the two ex-presidents. Trump assured his hosts that unlike his predecessors, he would “take care of our friends.”
Such friendships, Trump explained, would no longer take into account human rights, democracy, or other moral considerations. At the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, he rebuked “Western interventionalists” who delivered “lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” In an implicit reference to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who authorized the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Trump declared: “Far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
In place of morals, Trump signaled that under his leadership, America would focus on one thing: money. He groused that after Bush “spent $10 trillion on blowing up the Middle East,” America was “left with nothing.” This, apparently, was a restatement of Trump’s frequent objection that the United States failed to “take the oil” when it invaded Iraq.
The same was true of Ukraine, said Trump: It’s a stupid financial loss. “We spent $350 billion there,” he complained during his remarks in Qatar. “Every time [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] came to the United States, he’d walk away with a hundred billion dollars,” Trump huffed. “It was like taking candy from a baby.”
On Thursday, as Trump flew from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates, a reporter asked him whether he was disappointed that Russia hadn’t sent a top-level delegation to peace talks about Ukraine. Trump replied that this wasn’t nearly as important as the investment pledges he was securing from Gulf nations. He mocked the reporter’s question: “We just took in $4 trillion, and he says, ‘Are you disappointed about a delegation?’”
On Friday, during an interview with Bret Baier in the UAE, Trump hit the same talking point. “I’ve always been good with money. I make money,” he boasted. He summarized his Gulf tour in financial terms: “In four days, I made twelve times what we spent in Ukraine.”
TO BE FAIR, TRUMP DID CRITICIZE two countries. On the day before his Gulf trip, he accused South Africa of waging “genocide” against white farmers. He repeated that allegation aboard Air Force One on his way back from the UAE. “The farmers in South Africa are being treated brutally . . . and nobody wants to cover it,” he protested, having spent the past four days ignoring human rights abuses in the Gulf states. “South Africa is out of control.”
The other country Trump condemned was the United States. While eschewing any criticism of the Gulf monarchies, he depicted America as a phony democracy. In Saudi Arabia, he blamed his 2020 defeat on “a rigged election.” In Qatar, he insisted again that “the election was rigged.” In the UAE, he said American courts that challenged his autocratic deportation policies were “taking [a] privilege that they shouldn’t have.”
Two hours after spouting his rigged-election lie in Qatar, Trump repeated it to American troops at the nearby Al Udeid Air Base. A normal president would have thanked the troops for serving the United States. But Trump, without their confirmation or consent, thanked them for supporting him politically. “We had three unbelievable campaigns,” he told the assembled service members, and “nobody [has] been stronger than the military in terms of backing us, nobody. So I just want to thank you all very much.”
Trump then sought to turn the troops against his domestic opponents. He told them that Biden and his administration were “evil, bad people.” He again accused Democrats of election theft, claiming, “We won three elections.” And perhaps most disturbingly—given that he was speaking to an audience of on-duty, uniformed military service members—he gloated that by threatening to run again, in defiance of the Constitution, “We’re driving the left crazy.”
THESE ARE NOT THE WORDS of a patriot. They’re the words of a man who, for money and ego, is willing to savage his countrymen and his country.
On Monday night, in a dinner speech to his newly appointed Kennedy Center board, Trump bragged again about how much investment he had raked in from the Gulf states. He marveled at how radically he had changed America in just one hundred days. He told the board: “The king of Saudi Arabia said, ‘Your place, your country, has a whole different image now.’”
We certainly do.
Great Job Will Saletan & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
