On Monday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) responded to President Donald Trump pointing to Iran attempting to assassinate him by saying that we’re not working “to tackle a planet that’s getting too hot from climate change,” and have the “leadership of a child throwing a tantrum.”
Co-host Michael Steele asked, “I’m going to read to you the words of our child President, our little boy President, who is about as petty as anyone I’ve seen. He said, on the night of the Iranian operations, telling ABC News, ‘I got him before he got me,’ Trump said Sunday night, not long after he announced Ayatollah Khamenei had been killed. ‘They tried twice. Well, I got him first.’ That’s our foreign policy. That’s why we’re in Iran. In addition to being a puppet or a puppy to Netanyahu, Donald Trump is all about the retribution, all about getting someone before they get him. Is that how this country should conduct its foreign policy? Because, next in his crosshairs, after Venezuela, now we’ve got Iran, is Cuba. What will the Senate do when troops start running all over Cuba? What will the Senate do when another country that Donald Trump wants to go after, because, in his own little childish mind, he’s got to get payback?”
Merkley responded, “Well, I’m glad you mentioned Cuba, because that is Rubio’s key goal is to cut off — he’s cut off the oil to Cuba. And, then, I don’t expect troops on the ground, but the idea that we might start negotiating with Cuba, and, then, in the middle of it, start taking out their leaders if we have the intelligence to do so. It’s been demonstrated now twice. So, absolutely — this is gunboat strategy that hearkens back to a previous era. And there is, in this, no American leadership about the world we need to build together on this planet earth. There is simply, well, I will be a king, and I don’t like people, I’ll take them out, I will assassinate them. … [T]his is not a pattern for building a better world. There’s not an objective here that says, we have big issues, that we need to advance democracy. There’s — no, that’s not that, we need to tackle a planet that’s getting too hot from climate change, so, we’ll work — no we’re not, you described it as the leadership of a child throwing a tantrum. That’s pretty much it.”
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