On Wednesday, while Donald Trump was fleeing Britain to escape the eviscerating mockery of our western allies, I remembered something he posted on Twitter back in 2014. Opining about politics from his lofty perch as owner of the Miss Universe pageant, he tweeted: “We need a President who isn’t a laughing stock to the entire World. We need a truly great leader, a genius at strategy and winning. Respect!”
Fast forward to the scrum of allied leaders – deliciously captured in Joe Biden’s quick turnaround campaign ad – as they imbibed their libations and chuckled among themselves about the clown-in-chief’s latest antics. The ad highlights a theme that deserves major attention in the 2020 election – America’s weakened standing in the world, thanks to the buffoon who gets and warrants no respect.
The audio (over clips of Trump making a fool of himself at summits and at the United Nations): “World leaders caught on camera laughing about President Trump…Several world leaders mocking President Trump. They’re laughing at him….World leaders mocking and ridiculing him for being completely off-balance. Allies say they are deeply worried about him. They say he’s becoming increasingly isolated. Something is very wrong.”
Then we hear Biden: “The world sees Trump for what he is – insincere, ill-informed, corrupt, dangerously incompetent, and incapable, in my view, of world leadership. And if we give Donald Trump four more years, we’ll have a great deal of difficulty of ever being able to recover America’s standing in the world, and our capacity to bring nations together.”
Two caveats: (1) Biden has his own flaws as a foreign policy maven, most notably his vote to authorize George W. Bush’s disastrous, destabilizing war in Iraq, and (2) Most voters only care about foreign policy when a sizeable number of Americans are being killed somewhere.
But this new campaign ad is a two-fer, because it’s obvious by definition that Biden, despite his “gaffes,” would at least be respected abroad; and because America’s standing in an increasingly volatile world is crucially important, for the sake of our security and the security of our allies. And since nobody else in the Democratic field can match uncle Joe’s breadth of experience in the foreign policy realm, this campaign ad enables Biden to distinguish himself from his rivals and draw a stark contrast with Trump.
And even if most Democratic primary voters aren’t strongly motivated by foreign policy issues, Republican-leaning independents and never-Trump Republicans potentially are. Part of Biden’s pitch to Democrats is that he can cross over and capture a hefty share of those voters. Indeed, it can be argued that the new campaign ad is pitched directly to voters on the other side who are alarmed about America’s eroding global reputation.
That erosion has been well documented. At Trump’s two-year mark, the Pew Research Center, in a survey of opinion in 25 nations, found that 70 percent of those citizens had no confidence that Trump would do the right thing in world affairs. That share has plummeted since Barack Obama left office. Other surveys have found that foreign respect for America has sharply declined in virtually all nations since Trump’s ascent – with the lone exceptions of Russia and Israel. That helps to explain the spectacle, 15 months ago, when Trump boasted to the U.N. General Assembly that he’d already accomplished more than almost any administration in history – and was met with derisive laughter.
Steve Schmidt, the ex-Republican strategist who was close to John McCain, tweeted today that Trump “commands neither respect or fear. He is a clown in the trappings of the most powerful office on earth. What delight it must give our adversaries to sit across the table from such a fool…A five star fool in the eyes of everyone except his cult.”
But there’s an upside to the global polls. When Pew asked people in those 25 nations to envision what the ideal international order should look like, they still said that the United States should lead the way. Despite all our miscalculations (some of them disastrous), we still enjoy a reservoir of global good will, thanks to the postwar web of western alliances that Trump has sought to weaken. Joe Biden, in his ad, sees the need to snuff the laughter – and he recognizes that foreign policy can be fertile Democratic turf in 2020. His rivals would be wise to see it as well, and to stump for a post-clown America.