A former State Department official bashed President Donald Trump's speech before the United Nations Tuesday as "bonkers" — and said it weakened U.S. standing on the international stage.
The president launched into a 55-minute litany of his domestic accomplishments and delivered a lengthy tirade against immigration rates throughout Europe, saying "your countries are going to hell," and attacked renewable energy and claimed climate change was "the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world."
"This is Trump unconstrained first andforemost, and clearly hedecided to get a lot off hischest," said Joel Rubin, a senior State Department official under Barack Obama. "You know, I've beengoing to UN general assemblies,either working on them oroutside and speaking andmeeting with people commenting, of course, as well.Like this morning, I've neverseen a speech like this. Thiswas bonkers, this was out ofcontrol. It made no strategicsense. It did not lay out avision for how we're going toactually achieve our goals in amultilateral forum."
"It did nottalk about the threats that the United States faces and what weneed to do to counter them," Rubin added. "Apparently, the biggest threatnow is renewable energy. That's our number one concern, notnuclear weapons or terrorism or China's encroachment in Asia or Russia's war against Ukraine,and so I just find itincredibly damaging to America's standing in the world,damaging to our nationalsecurity strategy and damagingto how other countries are nowgoing to deal with us, whichmeans they're just going tomove further and further awayas this kind of communicationand leadership continues."
Rubin also noted that Trump made clear that he prefers to work with other world leaders whom he likes personally, but he said the record doesn't seem to bear that out.
"Vladimir Putin has been someone he's liked, right? But he hasn't gotten anywhere with Vladimir Putin, and so there's no plan to stop these wars," Rubin said. "There's no meeting with the protagonists, with NATO, that comes out with core principles. There's no American backbone right now on either of these conflicts, and so we see just an overwhelming diminishment of our influence, and I think that's the key point to remember, which is that the United Nations is a voting body, and we are losing every vote at the United Nations time and again, and the United States does need to play a key role."
"We do need to be a leader in resolving these issues, these conflicts," he added. "We do hold the key to ending the war between Israel and Hamas and between Russia and Ukraine, and we're just not leaning in, and so I think he wants success on the cheap, and I just feel like we're watching the results right now in real time."