Donald Trump on Thursday outlined his vision for America’s future, and it’s starting to sound a lot like Russia, a Washington Post columnist said.
In a video released on the right-wing friendly platform Rumble, ostensibly to offer a plan to avoid nuclear catastrophe, the former president went off script to attack neoconservatives and Marxists, among others.
And in the estimation of Post columnist Philip Bump, Trump articulated a vision of America that emulates the values of one of its greatest adversaries.
Trump in the video said aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia is a neoconservative effort involving the Biden administration to trigger World War III.
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“The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the deep Staters and put America first. We have to put America first.”
Trump suggested America needs to reassess its role in NATO and a “foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.”
“But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It's probably more than anything else - ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.”
However misguided Trump’s view of geopolitics may be, Bump in a column titled “Trump escalates his white-nationalist doomerism” argues that Trump’s assertions paint a disturbing picture of where the former president would take us if elected to a second term.
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The America-haters in Trump’s estimation support abolishing national borders and are behind the failure to police our own cities, the destruction of the rule of law from within, the collapse of the nuclear family and (lower) fertility rates, “like nobody can believe is happening.”
“It's the Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshipping at the altar of race and gender and environment.”
Bump argues that Trump is campaigning as “backstop against the collapse of white culture” that’s threatened more by culture wars than Russia, noting that “since the left is framed as antagonistic to the United States, even valid criticisms are dismissed as America-hating.”
“But pick it apart,” Bump writes. “Trump is also saying that Russia — autocratic, aggressive, homogenous — is more compatible with ‘Western civilization’ than the United States.”