Donald Trump addressed the U.N. yesterday and he had them rolling in the aisles. After all, absurdity can be down right funny. Dana Milbank writes:
The world is now laughing at us — specifically, at our president.
“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” Trump boasted, in typical fashion, to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. “So true,” he added, as if addressing a campaign rally.
But the rest of his speech wasn't funny at all:
It felt as though Triumph the Insult Comic Dog had been unleashed in the General Assembly.
Not only did Trump criticize the usual suspects — Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and particularly Iran — but he also attacked China, the 15-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the 164-nation World Trade Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, Germany, the International Criminal Court, socialist countries (what did the Scandinavians ever do to him?), and the United Nations’ two-month-old Global Compact on Migration. He threatened recipients of U.S. foreign aid — almost all of South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and South Asia — and reiterated his vow to cut payments for peacekeeping.
By the end of the barrage, he had taunted nations that are home to perhaps 90 percent of the world’s population. Billions of people dissed in half an hour? Even for Trump that’s huge.
Trump's ignorance was on full display. The man who avoided service in Vietnam doesn't know what so many other soldiers died for in World War II:
Each time he used the word “global,” it was as an epithet, disparaging the very principle on which the world body was founded amid the ashes of World War II. America rejects “global governance, control and domination,” he said, and “we will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy,” and “we reject the ideology of globalism and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”
Trump confirmed Samuel Johnson's observation that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. And he confirmed that the Ugly American is back -- and on steroids. The laughter quickly died and the delegates shook their heads. How else should they have responded to Freddie Kruger at the U.N?
Image: Looper
