Brooks: Trump Has ‘Undermined’ Post-War Order, ‘General Sense of Chaos and Incompetence’ With Mexico

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated President Donald Trump “undermined the post-war international order,” and there’s a “general sense of chaos and incompetence” in how he handled the fight with Mexico over a border wall.

Brooks said Trump has “undermined the post-war international order, pretty quickly. Tearing down TPP was a bill that I think economists say would have produced hundreds of millions — billions of dollars of earnings every year for Americans. Picking a fight with our second biggest export market, very unnerving. I don’t see the — but then I think the two other things I’d say is, the general sense of chaos and incompetence on how you do it. OK, you want to pick a fight with Mexico. Do you have to do it by tweet? Do you have put forward a proposal that would have Americans paying for the wall, and then sort of withdraw it, and then sort of not withdraw it, do in a way maximally designed to polarize Mexican opinion against the United States? And then the final thing is, I wonder, I’m left wondering, how much of this is real? OK, he signs a series of papers that Steve Bannon and others wrote for him, but who’s going to implement it? Does it make any sense? … How much of it is the government just going to let him sign papers and then it just goes along their merry way?”

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