This is your regularly scheduled hypocrisy alert.
Video:
President Donald Trump said during a White House press conference that he would be willing to meet Iran without preconditions.
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Asked whether he was willing to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Trump said, “I would certainly meet with Iran if they wanted to meet,” Trump added, saying he would require “no preconditions.”
You will hear this touted as Trump’s willingness to negotiate, which might actually be a decent thing if he weren’t throwing bombs first like pulling out of the Iran Deal in an attempt to look like a strongman. But the real issue here is conservatives berated President Obama for being willing to meet without preconditions. It was actually a right-wing scandal at the time.
Sean Hannity, for example, said on October 26, 2008 that being willing to meet without preconditions was a display of Obama’s lack of foreign policy expertise: “One of the most disturbing displays of Obama’s lack of foreign policy expertise came during last year’s YouTube debate. The junior senator from Illinois gave what many called a naive answer for a question from the audience about whether he would meet with the leaders of Syria, Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea without preconditions.”
The Washington Post reported at the time that the Republican National Committee circulated stories ridiculing Obama’s willingness to meet without preconditions:
“Anything that looks like pandering to dictators is bad politics in South Florida,” said Republican state Rep. David Rivera of Miami. He predicted Obama’s comments would come back to haunt him, particularly if he becomes the Democratic nominee.
The Republican National Committee on Tuesday circulated stories calling attention to and ridiculing Obama’s remarks.
Sure, politicians can flip flop and stand on both sides of an issue depending on their team, but this is absurd. This is a basic tenet of what used to be Republican foreign policy – the Bush doctrine approach. The strongman.
It would be great if this could be an area where Trump might be doing some good, but Trump’s word is worthless. He takes credit for negotiations after throwing a bomb to destroy previous work, so his negotiations are often to bring us back to where we were under Obama or Bush. This is not progress to be touted. It is a lot of distraction and chaos, but not actual progress.
One of the prevailing challenges under Trump is accurately reporting what’s going on, since what is going on changes by the moment and Trump misleads the press corp on the most basic issues. The North Korea talks are a good example. Even in the above linked PolitiFact fact check, they say that Trump’s stated policy was tougher on North Korea than Obama’s stated policy. Because Trump SAID he was getting some kind of concessions before talking. Those concessions were about testing but this was later conflated and reported as a huge policy win of getting North Korea to stop developing nukes.
But North Korea is still developing on nuclear fuel in spite of its pledge to denuclearize, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Now Trump is just willing to talk with no preconditions.
Republicans thought Obama was inexperienced and naive, but now they support this man who not only knows less about what he’s doing than Obama did and has less experience, but stood on the side of Russia while Russia is attacking our country, so his motives and understandings of foreign policy are questionable way past naive. Naive would be a compliment at this point for Trump.
It matters that Republicans will excuse and justify anything Trump does, even when it goes against their most basic previous stances, because they are standing for Trump even when Trump stands against the United States.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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