Lawrence O’Donnell explains why Mexican President Peña Nieto’s decision to not attend a scheduled meeting with Pres. Trump over the border wall is Trump’s first humiliation on the global stage and sends a message to other world leaders about future negotiations.
Can Donald Trump Handle the Truth?
Debating crowd sizes may seem inconsequential and petty, and it is. But Mr. Trump was the one who had been unable to let go of the issue during his first week in office: On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that on the morning after he was sworn in, the president himself pressured the director of the National Park Service to locate more photos of the crowd in hopes of disproving news media accounts of its size. With behavior like this, Mr. Trump has reminded the nation of an essential truth about his personality: He sees what he wants to see, and nothing else.
.. Any information that challenges his worldview does not lead him to reconsider his beliefs; it “gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him,” Timothy O’Brien, one of Mr. Trump’s biographers, told Politico recently.
.. We have had incurious presidents before, and they also displayed tremendous self-certainty. Yet even The Decider himself, George W. Bush, proved willing to rethink his views as contrary facts came to light — like the failure of Iraqis to garland American occupiers with flowers. Mr. Trump is not merely uninterested in facts; he repels them. In their place, he confects his own reality to feed his bottomless emotional and psychological needs. It is not America First, it is Donald Trump First, and always.
Donald Trump, Imperialist: He Longs to Build Up Our Military and Then Use It
Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO and other alliances aren’t really about wanting to pull America to remain within its borders. He never says that. In fact, he wants a huge military and wants to show it off so everyone in the world will be in awe of American power. He just wants NATO and other alliances to pay protection money to the U.S. for whatever price he sets.
.. Trump has repeatedly made the fatuous claim that he’s going to make the military so massive that “no one will ever want to mess with us” but never has actually suggested that he would have any reluctance to use it. Indeed, he’s made it clear that he intends to do just that, telling his rowdy crowds during the campaign:
ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because of the oil that they took away, they have some in Syria, they have some in Iraq, I would bomb the shit out of them.
I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the refineries. I’d blow up ever single inch. There would be nothing left.
And you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there, and in two months—you ever see these guys? How good they are, the great oil companies. They’ll rebuild it brand new…. And I’ll take the oil.
.. If you have listened to Trump talk about China over the past 18 months, it is clear that he is not simply talking about a potential trade war but is prepared to confront the world’s largest nation militarily.
.. He openly declares that he believes in the old saying “to the victors belong the spoils,” either suggesting that he has no clue about the West’s colonial past and how that sounds to people around the world or simply doesn’t care. He’s not talking about isolationism but the exact opposite—American global dominance without all those messy institutions and international agreements standing in the way of taking what we want.
.. No, Trump is not an isolationist. He’s not a “realist.” Neither is he a liberal interventionist or a neoconservative idealist. He’s an old-fashioned imperialist. He wants to Make America great again by making it the world’s dominant superpower, capable of bullying other countries into submission and behaving however we like. He doesn’t seem to understand that the world won’t put up with that.
Trump’s Diplomacy By Humiliation
It is hard to believe that we are now governed by a president who goes out of his way to provoke other nations. The bizarre contretemps with the president of Mexico is pointlessly destructive of one of America’s most important relationships. What kind of president wakes up determined to insult the president of a friendly country — a country whose cooperation we need? It beggars belief.
.. Who benefits from this? Is it really to America’s advantage to have the nation on our southern border hating us? Is it really to America’s advantage to set the stage for the Mexicans to elect a president who promises to spite the United States at every turn? If we crash the Mexican economy, does it help us to have a poorer and more chaotic neighbor on our Southern border? The Mexican state is already feeble versus the drug cartels. Do we want to make it worse?
.. This is diplomacy by humiliation, which is no diplomacy at all. It’s starting to become clear that whoever follows Trump in office is going to have his or her hands full rebuilding things that Trump smashed for no reason other than it felt good to push others around.