Ignored White House aides ahead of U.N. speech
09/25/17 09:00 AM
By Steve Benen
Donald Trump’s first speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week was a unique opportunity. The American president has quickly become the target of international mockery and derision, and many observers around the world see the television-personality-turned-politician as a ridiculous buffoon, incapable of leadership, statesmanship, and diplomacy.
But if Trump’s address was an opportunity to chart a new course, he blew it. The speech not only included juvenile taunts, as if this were another one of the president’s self-indulgent red-state rallies, but it served as a reminder that Trump’s foreign policy vision is increasingly incoherent.
As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne put it, the president’s speech "was supposed to be a serious formulation of the president’s grand strategy in the world ... but every effort Trump made to build an intellectual structure to support it only underscored that his favored phrase was either a trivial applause line or an argument that, if followed logically, was inimical to the United States’ interests and values."
The remarks were so plainly absurd that some White House aides apparently told the L.A. Times that Trump ignored their advice before delivering it ...
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-reportedly-ignored-white-house-aides-ahead-un-speech
