Remember when your relatives would come back from vacation and force you to watch their slide show to prove what a great time they had?
President Donald Trump returned from his 12-day Asian trip and called the country to assemble and listen to him prove what a great job he did. Anyone who watched the progress of Trump abroad could have predicted exactly what he would say in his speech Wednesday: Everyone respects me. Everyone now respects America because of me.
In remarks delivered in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Trump enumerated a number of achievements, but the reality is that the trip served mostly to show how far the United States is moving from its position of global leadership.
The specifics Trump cited will trigger the customary stampede of fact checkers, now well-trained to refute the barrage of hyperbole and falsehoods we hear regularly from Trump.
Indeed, because we all watched the trip, saw the tweets, and heard the comments it was easy to see — embarrassingly obvious — that foreign leaders know how to seduce the President. Trump loves praise. He showers himself with it and demands it from others. That makes him easy to manipulate, and that’s what we saw while he was in Asia.
If Trump thinks red carpets, state dinners and adulation mean the world respects him, he is sadly mistaken.
His claim, that his reception in Asia is “further evidence that America’s renewed confidence and standing in the world has never been stronger,” is patently false.
Polls show the Trump presidency has resulted in a loss of confidence in the United States and a loss of trust in the American President in almost every country in the world.
And while the President rubbed elbows with Asian heads of state, this trip was almost entirely devoid of interaction with everyday people. America’s role as an inspiration for younger generations, America’s promotion of freedom and democracy, were nonexistent.
In their place, Trump lavished saccharine praise on dictators and strongmen. The North Korean leader came in for schoolyard-style criticism (Trump’s bonkers tweet about Kim Jong Un being “short and fat,” was the kind of pronouncement from the President of the United States that erodes confidence, rather than builds it), but there was nary a word about Philippine President Duterte and his so-called anti-drug campaign, which frequently consists of murdering people in the streets without any chance of due process.
Trump boasted of his great achievements on trade on behalf of the American people. But on that score, all he did was talk. While he went on about bringing an end to unfair trade deals, the rest of Asia took concrete action to move on without America. Trump pulled the US out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership as soon as he took office. The deal would have boosted trade in countries accounting for 40% of global GDP.
He promised to replace the deal with agreements between the US and each country individually. But what we saw during Trump’s trip is that no country has shown any interest in negotiating such an agreement with the US. And the remaining 11 countries of the TPP are forging the landmark agreement on their own. Trump claims he is making stronger economic alliances for the United States, but the reality is that he is isolating America in a globalized world.
As in previous trips, he claimed that he secured big-ticket agreements that will create thousands of jobs. But that is mostly a fantasy. His claim that he secured $250 billion worth of deals with China turns out to be smoke, mirrors and promises — that is, many non-binding deals. (This is reminiscent of his boast after traveling to the Middle East, that he had made $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. A closer look at those sales showed little of substance. One expert called it “fake news.”)
It is true that the President has focused global attention on the North Korean threat. And perhaps that will pay off. But there’s no guarantee, and some, including US allies, fear that Trump may make the problem worse, even triggering a nuclear war.
In fact, Trump’s foreign policy seems designed to damage America’s global influence. Trump’s deferential, admiring tone with China’s leader Xi Jinping, gave Beijing exactly what it wants, an apparent acceptance by the US that China has a claim to global leadership on a par with Washington.
For White House staffers and other Americans watching nervously from the edge of their seat, fearing a major gaffe, the President’s trip was a triumph in that he mostly — mostly — avoided making outrageous statements. That triumph is the ultimate expression of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Trump’s trip report, his slide show, had the puffed up, dramatic descriptions and self-praise that we have come to expect. The truth is that the trip accomplished little, if anything, no matter what the traveler claimed.
