For those who might have been too distracted by impeachment proceedings to follow campaign politics, let us catch you up.
Former Vice President Joe Biden released a video this week deriding the president as a global laughingstock. Biden’s campaign would have the American people believe that because a video recently surfaced showing top NATO leaders openly mocking President Donald Trump at the London summit, he has somehow recently — perhaps this week, this month or even this year — lost the respect of the world.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If there’s one thing Americans can have absolute faith in, it’s this: World leaders never had a high opinion of Trump.
The behind-the-back snickering is nothing new. Since the moment he took office (and likely before), Trump has been regarded as a 21st century version of Margaret Dumont from the Marx brothers movies who gets played right and left by the sharpies around her.
Sometimes, it’s funny, as when he once claimed Korea used to be part of China or suggested Israel was outside the Middle East. Oftentimes, it’s scary, as when he scorns allies, embraces tin-pot dictators and seems completely oblivious to, and uninterested in, the role U.S. diplomacy plays in the world.
Biden’s ad never makes the claim that the worldview of Trump is only recently diminished, of course. But then that’s the oddity of going after the president based on snickering instead of listing his long, sad string of foreign policy failures such as his tariff wars and inability to make much headway on trade agreements; his abandonment of the Kurds in Syria; his made-for-TV flirtations with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who continues to test missiles and develop nuclear weapons; and his rejection of the Iran nuclear deal or Paris agreement on climate change.
And that’s not even throwing in his recent aside about how it’s a “very interesting question” about whether the U.S. should still recognize NATO’s Article 5 and rush to the aid of any member country that comes under attack. Seriously?
It’s moments like that when one assumes Vladimir Putin hands out some more Hero of the Russian Federation medals to his operatives involved in 2016 U.S. election interference (and likely sets aside more for 2020).
A president who goes through national security advisers (he’s on his fourth) like the rest of us replace our furnace air filters is unlikely to inspire a lot of confidence in the world stage.
Trump supporters seem to love the president’s disrespect of allies, his disdain for diplomatic convention and his hot-and-cold approach to trade negotiations, but this is largely because, we assume, they are simply unaware of the good that calm, reasoned, cautious and rational diplomacy has done to maintain the peace and promote this nation’s prosperity.
Thus, the video and Biden’s campaign ad aren’t likely to change a lot of minds.
U.S. voters don’t often make foreign policy a top issue when they go to the polls anyway.
Even so, let the record show that ridicule of the buffoonery on the world stage by the nation’s 45th president is positively not a new thing, nor is the buffoonery itself. At this particular behavior, the president might truly be the greatest ever.
— The Baltimore Sun
