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 and foremost, and clearly he decided to get a lot off his chest," said Joel Rubin, a senior State Department official under Barack Obama. "You know, I've been going to UN general assemblies, either working on them or outside and speaking and meeting with people commenting, of course, as well. Like this morning, I've never seen a speech like this. This was bonkers, this was out of control. It made no strategic sense. It did not lay out a vision for how we're going to actually achieve our goals in a multilateral forum."
"It did not talk about the threats that the United States faces and what we need to do to counter them," Rubin added. "Apparently, the biggest threat now is renewable energy. That's our number one concern, not nuclear weapons or terrorism or China's encroachment in Asia or Russia's war against Ukraine, and so I just find it incredibly damaging to America's standing in the world, damaging to our national security strategy and damaging to how other countries are now going to deal with us, which means they're just going to move further and further away as this kind of communication and 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."
- YouTube youtu.be
