David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, went on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell on Monday to try and make sense out of Donald Trump's interview with his paper.
Initially, I thought Ben Carson looked pretty foolish whenever he tried to discuss his foreign policy plans as president, which really cost him a shot at the job, but he had nothing on Donald Trump's world view for America.
David Sanger teamed up to write the NY Times article with Maggie Haberman, and they had a lot to say.
Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or “substantially reimburse” the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.
“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump said during a 100-minute interview on foreign policy, spread over two phone calls on Friday, “I don’t think it would be around.”
He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the American nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China. If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.
And he said he would be willing to withdraw United States forces from both Japan and South Korea if they did not substantially increase their contributions to the costs of housing and feeding those troops. “Not happily, but the answer is yes,” he said.
Mr. Trump also said he would seek to renegotiate many fundamental treaties with American allies, possibly including a 56-year-old security pact with Japan, which he described as one-sided.
Please read the entire piece because it's very good.
In the above video, Andrea Mitchell tries to wrap her head around the many things Sanger had to tell her. It's well worth a look.
Digby wrote a long piece on Donald's NY Times interview and writes:
Donald Trump managed to shock the world once again. Last week, he actually sank so low that he publicly attacked Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi’s looks. Not that anyone thought he wasn’t the type to say such rude things. He’s made a habit of it for many years. But he is running for president and, more importantly, he did this during a period when all eyes were on Europe in the wake of another devastating terrorist attack, and he was simultaneously criticizing the president for continuing on his historic diplomatic mission to Cuba and Argentina.
But that wasn’t what shocked the world. What has put every government on the planet on high alert was his alarming interview in the New York Times on the subject of foreign policy.......read on
It's a very chilling piece, one that you need to read.
