In the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, Trump has repeatedly spread false information questioning President-elect Joe Biden’s victory - and been rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook. This all serves pretty much the same purpose in foreign policy that political correctness, Mexican walls, and Muslim bans serve in Trump’s domestic policy.Īnd there you have it.The labels Facebook has been putting on false election posts from President Donald Trump have failed to slow their spread across the platform, according to internal data seen by BuzzFeed News. We will proudly defend the values of Western civilization. Gotta be unpredictable, after all.īut whatever else you take away, America will be strong under Donald Trump. So what would Trump do about actual conflicts that are actually happening right now? Would he send troops to Ukraine? To Syria? To Libya? To Yemen? To Iraq? Naturally, he didn’t say. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what any of them mean.) Somebody put these buzzwords in his speech and he read them. Where did that come from? In any case, the Pentagon is obviously already working on all three of these things, so it’s not clear just what Trump has in mind. Then there was the big mystery: his out-of-the-blue enthusiasm for 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwar. He will support our friends-but he doesn’t really think much of international agreements like NATO. He won’t tell ISIS how or when he’s going to wipe them out-but it will be very soon and with overwhelming force. We will rebuild our military and our enemies will fear us-but “war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” We will be unpredictable-but also consistent so everyone knows they can trust us. We will crush our enemies and protect our friends-but only if our friends display suitable gratitude for everything we do for them. Aside from that, Trump’s main theme seemed to be contradicting himself at every turn. He will destroy ISIS, crush Iran, wipe out the trade deficit with China, eradicate North Korea’s bomb program, and give Russia five minutes to cut a deal with us or face the consequences. Trump will do only things that are in America’s interest. His base doesn’t know where it came from and couldn’t care less. It fits his favorite themes well, and the only people who care about its history are a bunch of overeducated pedants. In this case, the zeitgeist was “America First”-and everyone’s first question was, does he know? Does he know that this is a phrase made famous by isolationists prior to World War II? My own guess is that he didn’t know this the first time he used it, but he does now. Trump is a zeitgeisty kind of guy, and that’s the only real way to evaluate anything he says. ![]() By any real-world standard, it was ridiculous.įact-checking his speech is sort of pointless, basically a category error. Compared with normal Trump, it wasn’t bad. ![]() By normal standards, though, he sounded about like a sixth grader reciting a speech from note cards. For a guy who never uses a teleprompter, not bad. So how did Trump do? That depends on your expectations. ![]() That’s Trump being presidential, I guess. You know, the one we were all looking forward to because it was written by an actual speechwriter and would be delivered via teleprompter. I kinda sorta listened to Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech this morning. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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