Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations was highlighted—in the most bizarre sense of the word—by his direct threat to North Korea.
“If it is forced to defend itself or it’s allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself, and for his regime.”
CNN has reported that this line was Trump’s personal contribution to the speech and that he “insisted” that it be left in. The best that can be said for it is that, compared to the admix of bumper sticker slogans and phrases taken from white nationalist rhetoric that were library-pasted together to form most of the text, it at least was relatively clear.
Trump’s speech before the United Nations started as all Trump speeches do: by bragging about Donald Trump. After informing the gathered world representatives that the stock market was up, and giving them the same distorted set of labor statistics that he uses in the rallies of his endless campaign, Trump moved on to informing them that the United States was going to throw record amounts of cash at its military, making America even more dominant in world affairs. The comment drew crickets when Trump paused for clearly expected applause.
The heart of the speech was a contradictory set of ideas. First came a declaration that the United States would support the idea of national “sovereignty” that seemed to have been lifted from European visions of strict nationalism, and step back on attempting to impose ideas like democracy or human rights. This was followed by an enemies list that took Trump to the brink of declaring war in every hemisphere.
Trump didn’t just attack North Korea. He spent an even longer period attacking Iran, then Syria, then Cuba, then Venezuela—with side trips to attack “radical Islam” and an absolutely jaw-dropping step into Cold War era hyperbole about the evils of socialism.
Trump opened his praise of nations as sovereigns with a statement that “In America we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.“ Which provides a handy excuse to not mention human rights to China, or freedom of speech to Russia, or say anything at all about the ongoing massacre in Myanmar. It’s a major break—not just with Democratic presidents but also with Republican presidents going back for a century.
However, this new respect for the absolute sovereignty of nations didn’t stop Trump from blatantly adopting a good vs. evil position in attacking North Korea, an attack that included his tooth-grinding mention of “Rocket Man.” Because calling a national leader by a childish name is something that always plays well at the UN.
Trump spent even more time on attacking Iran, using vague and unattributed statements in painting them as a threat equal to Kim’s regime and acting as if there was no Iran deal to check their nuclear program before turning around to call that deal “an embarrassment to the United States.” As with many recent statements, Trump seemed to be setting up the idea of walking away from the deal—an action that would encourage Iran to follow North Korea down the fast path to nuclear weapons—but he didn’t quite pull the United States out of the agreement. Today.
After inserting an attack on Islamic terrorists, Trump moved on to go after the regime in Syria. He bragged about the U.S. use of missiles to hit a Syrian air base, and talked about how much more efficient it was for other countries in the area to take in refugees while the United States slipped them some payments, rather than letting people whose lives were endangered by regimes that Trump was willing to “utterly destroy” move to the United States.
Trump took this opportunity to also introduce a long list of good things that the United States was doing for the world, ticking off everything from programs on AIDS treatment to protecting the rights of women. Some of these did get resounding applause. None of them were started by Trump. All of them are under threat from Trump’s budget proposal.
Moving to the New World, Trump took a quick shot at Cuba, ensuring that he would keep that sovereign nation under sanctions for not having the right kind of leadership, before going heavily after the regime in Venezuela. Not only did Trump’s rhetoric on Venezuela include threats of action that seemed all too similar to what he promised in North Korea, he then swung into an attack on the whole idea of socialism, saying …
“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”
Trump trotted out a list of communist and socialist states from the Cold War, claiming that wherever socialism has been tried, it has failed. He paused to collect plaudits several times, but the audience—many of them from countries engaged in some form of democratic socialism—gave this statement a notably cold reception.
Then it was time for Trump to complain about the United Nations itself. Specifically, he complained that the United States pays too much and doesn’t get everyone to do what it wants. The whole section amounted to “if we’re paying so much, you should do what we want.” Trump also hinted that the United States was paying even more than people knew, undoubtedly through the secret globalist funding mechanisms that only InfoWars can reveal.
After a long section of statements that apparently had been chopped from other speeches, and which together seemed to … fill time, Trump returned to talking about how nations should be sovereign.
That was today’s theme: People don’t have rights, but nations do. States are sovereign—except for every single state that Donald Trump mentioned in his speech. We get to #$%@ with those.
Oh, and we also reserve the right to take down any state that tolerates Muslims, socialism, or become the focus of hatred from Pepe-lovers on Reddit. Why? Because some states are more sovereign than others. Especially those who are spending record amounts on their military.