Here are the bullet points on how conservative and liberal news media outlets responded to the president’s United Nations address.
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This week, the media divide was illustrated by the starkly different reactions from liberal and conservative commentators to President Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Right-leaning pundits thought Trump hit a nationalist home run by condemning an ineffectual U. N. and pledging to defend U. S. national security. Left-leaning commentators, on the other hand, saw an unhinged madman willing to start a nuclear war.
In a piece for Fox News opinion, former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Trump „outlined a new standard for leadership on the world stage.“
„This speech explains the strategy of a sovereignty-based nationalism as a clear alternative to the globalist desire to submerge nations in international agreements and institutions,“ wrote Gingrich.
He said Trump’s plea for renewed nationalism was an „intellectual call to arms“ that —rather paradoxically — should stop the U. N. from allowing dangerous regimes to „disregard national laws“ and develop weapons of mass destruction.
„In many ways, the president’s appeal was reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s warnings against European appeasement of Hitler in the years leading up to World War II,“ Gingrich wrote.
Trump’s speech reminded the New Republic ’s Ryu Spaeth of the „hateful nonsense“ spewed by „pariah leaders“ like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in addresses to the U. N. General Assembly over the years.
We heard a lot this week about how we would see a new, sober Trump at the U. N., but instead we got the American version of [Gadhafi]. Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea. He referred to Kim Jong Un as “rocket man.” He said parts of the world were “going to hell.” He basically delivered Bush’s notorious Axis of Evil speech, except he excluded Iraq, added some choice bits from his American Carnage speech, and amped up the crazy.
Elliott Abrams, who served in foreign policy roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, thought Trump’s speech was a great success. The president rightly criticized the United Nations‘ bloated bureaucracy, cleverly made patriotism „the basis for international cooperation“ and boldly addressed the problematic regimes in Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, Abrams wrote in National Review.
Fair judges will call this speech a real success. Trump rose to the occasion and offered a speech that had both striking rhetoric and a sound argument that the success of individual states, each looking out for its own interests, is the basic building block of a successful U. N. and international system. This was a rare speech in that chamber, which has been filled with decades of lies, hypocrisy, and globaloney.
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said Tuesday the world is the closest it’s been to nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis but at least then „no one was worried about the mental stability of the president of the United States“ or his „childish need to prove himself.“
„To — as President Trump put it today — ‚totally destroy North Korea‘ is to kill 25 million people and that is a war crime,“ O’Donnell said. „The president of the United States went to the United Nations today and threatened to commit a war crime.“
„Nuclear war with North Korea has been unthinkable — completely, absolutely forever unthinkable — to every president except the untrained, ignorant and frighteningly dangerous man who is now the president of the United States,“ he added.
Breitbart News has been concerned that Trump would not „remain committed to the agenda that got him elected“ after the departure of Steve Bannon from the White House last month. But, the president’s U. N. speech „was a return to form“ that should give hope to his „America first“ base, wrote Breitbart’s Adam Shaw .
„In the roughly 40-minute address, Trump praised the founding ideas of the U. N. and noted the U. S.’s role in its founding — but warned that under his watch, the U. S. would not be taken advantage of under the guise of globalism and international friendship,“ Shaw said.
On Tuesday, as world leaders addressed the United Nations General Assembly, diplomats were lectured by an authoritarian, a torture apologist, a pillage enthusiast, a race-baiter, and a sectarian demagogue. At the U. N., that’s an ordinary day,“ wrote William Saletan for Slate . „But this time, the despot, the demagogue, and the war-crimes advocate had something unusual in common. This time, they were all the president of the United States.“
„For the first time, the American president was just another populist thug,“ he wrote. „Donald Trump used his 40 minutes not to make a case for universal rights, but to glorify nationalism.“
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