Krauthammer: ‘They’re Quaking in Their Boots in Foreign Capitals’

Friday on Fox News Chanel’s coverage of the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States, President Donald J. Trump, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said of President Trump‘s inaugural address that, “They’re quaking in their boots in foreign capitals.”

Krauthammer said, “I wanted to make a point about the speech. A part that we overlooked but I am sure is not being overlooked around the world. There are two audiences obviously for inaugural address—domestic and foreign. I guarantee you that they are quaking in their boots in foreign capitals, particularly of our allies and trading partners. The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most sort of hyper nationalist and in some ways, most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the second World War. What Trump pointed out, what he drew was a picture of a zero-sum world where what we’ve done for the world, they have been stealing from us. He says for decades we have enriched foreign industry at the expense of our American industry, subsidized others’ military at the expense of the weakening of our army.”

“We’ve made others rich while becoming poor. Then this scattering sense that the wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed around the world. In other words, the other guys, “the other,” including friends. Kennedy spoke harshly about the communist world. This is about our allies,” he continued.

“They have been stealing from us, our corrupt ruling class has taken the money of the middle-class and sent it around the world. That is the exaggerated anti-globalist view. I can understand a lot of the sentiments, but imagine how this has been heard in East Asia, in Europe, in other places, and then he ends up with a phrase that may not be as a resonant here, he says we are going to have one principle, “America First.” It is capitalized in the version that you get printed out, and capitalized in the name of the isolationist party from the 1930s that fought to keep us out of any entanglements abroad, i.e., out of the second World War, led by Charles Lindbergh and others that dismantled a week after Pearl Harbor. For many people around the world, the British in particular, that is quite a resonant phrase, and it says to them, to the free world, since Harry Truman and Eisenhower, we constructed a world where we carried a lot of you—economically, militarily, etc. That game is over, you are on your own. That is an amazing message for an inaugural address.  We heard it on the campaign, but that is policy now and it’s going to have a huge effect around the world.”

(h/t Mediaite)

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