Author and foreign policy analyst Max Boot feels President Donald Trump is making him feel like a “foreigner” in his own country.
“He’s making me feel like an outsider, a Russian, a Jew, an immigrant,” Boot told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
“Anything but kind of a normal mainstream American, because of the way that he is dividing us and balkanizing us and seems to be catering to this white nationalist agenda.”
Boot, an American citizen who emigrated from Russia to the Unites States at the age of 6, said he’s always considered America his “very own country” until now.
“That’s very much the message I’m getting from Trump, you know, when he is refusing to unequivocally condemn the white supremacists in Charlottesville, when he’s pardoning the racist former sheriff, Joe Arpaio, and when he’s deporting, potentially, 800,000 Dreamers from this country, it feels like there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And I’m not part of the ‘us’ anymore, somehow, even though I always thought I was.”
“I feel very American. I feel this is the only country I’ve ever known” he added.
A staunch conservative, Boot advised John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign and David Petraeus during the surge in Iraq. However, he opposes President Trump’s policies.
“Simply because I’m opposing Donald Trump, I’m getting deluged with anti-Semitic filth online and in Twitter and email and so forth.”
“It feels like Trump has given a license for these people to come out of the woodwork and to express their views more openly in a way that they did not do before.”
Boot said it was “especially chilling” to hear people like Steve Bannon and Steve Miller trying to change the character of the country by “saying we’re not a nation of immigrants.”
He warns that everybody should feel threatened by Trump and his closest advisers “redefining American identity in these white nationalist terms.”
