Shaking Things Up, Big League

Rick Klein: “The man likes his strongmen. From Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, to the heads of Turkey, Egypt, Thailand and now the Philippines, President Trump has broken with bipartisan tradition to offer praise and even a smattering of White House invites to a rogues’ gallery of despots, dictators and bad dudes. Now comes Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader whom Trump told CBS is a ‘smart cookie’ and whom he told Bloomberg News he would be ‘honored’ to meet ‘under the right circumstances.’ This is shaking things up, big league – in ways that challenge Republican orthodoxy and comfort levels, and mark a break from longstanding U.S. policy of seeking to isolate bad actors on the world stage.”

“Even the president’s history lessons are confounding. His contention that Andrew Jackson might have averted the Civil War – or ‘that one,’ in Trump’s formulation – reveals something about Trump’s state of mind that may be worse to take seriously instead of literally. It is literally false that Jackson expressed horror about events that happened more than a decade after the former president’s death. It is seriously troubling to many who have a stake in Trump policies to think that a slaveholder who was also behind the Indian Removal Act and the “Trail of Tears” would have done a better job making history than Abraham Lincoln.”