Daily Blast podcaster Greg Sargent and international relations professor Nicholas Grossman discussed President Donald Trump’s recent U.N. General Assembly speech wherein he boasted about his polling, insisted that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and threatened to unshackle the U.S. military from international law.
“What if the self-obsessed craziness from Trump is a sign of just how unreliable an actor in the world the U.S. has become?” Sargent asked Grossman.
“U.N. International diplomats had been telling themselves ‘it’s not that serious,’ and ‘these are negotiating tactics — they’ll blow over’. But now, watching this speech, a lot of them seem to think ‘this guy seems really crazy and America didn’t just elect him. They re-elected him,'” said Grossman.
Grossman pointed out that Trump revealed horrifying ignorance to U.N. members when he sounded surprised that he thought he could stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine more quickly and was surprised when he couldn’t.
“[Russian leader Vladimir] Putin did not invade Ukraine because he did not like Joe Biden,” Grossman said. “That’s not how this stuff works at all, but it does work like that in the weird Fox News universe.”
“He’s talking about [these things] in a shallow, reality show version in which he’s the main character and everybody’s just reacting to him. But the international audience knows that’s not how the world works,” he said.
“There were so many lies. There were things that were impossible. There’s no more illegal immigration, he claimed. … And the lies about the seven wars that Trump stopped,” said Grossman, referencing wars that are still underway, including the war in Congo and the Indian/Pakistan border conflict.
“He and the people around him really do not know what they’re doing,” Grossman said. “… He was throwing that in everybody’s face, and he made it harder for people to accept that that’s not the case.”
Worse, Grossman said the rest of the world knows “it won’t end for another three years.”
“And because this was not an election — it was a reelection — the world cannot assume we won’t go back to this [idiocy] again,” Grossman said, adding that Europeans are already shifting military purchases away from the U.S. because they understand can’t rely on us long term.
“Which really sucks, but I can’t blame them. That’s just the reality of things," he added.