It did not take Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley long to get into the spirit of Trump’s reckless adventurism on the world stage: appearing at the UN as Trump’s ambassador, she promptly threatened our allies, and as Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald says, “for no reason” anyone can see.
Watch courtesy of NBC News:
Nikki Haley promises “fresh eyes” at the UN: “For those that don’t have our back, we’re taking names.” https://t.co/hc8h8mD9y9 pic.twitter.com/lqXYuyceAE
— ABC News (@ABC) January 27, 2017
“Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N. and the way that we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure that our allies have our back as well.
“For those that don’t have our back, we’re taking names, we will make points to respond to that accordingly.
But this is a time of strength. This is a time of action. This is a time of getting things done and this administration is prepared and ready to go in, um, to have me go in, look at the UN and everything that’s working we’re going to make it better. Everything that’s not working we’re going to try and fix, and anything that seems to be obsolete, and not necessary, we’re going to do away with.”
Haley was speaking not as an ally to friends, but as a CEO taking over a company and laying down the law. The United States does not, just as Donald Trump does not, have authority to unilaterally make decisions. On the one hand are America’s allies (and other UN member nations) and on the other, Congress.
Here, as elsewhere, we see Trump acting not as president but as a dictator, his totalitarian tendencies on full display, shaming the United States, long the leader of the free world, before all. And if the US slashes funding as Trump has promised, he -and Haley – might find he has a lot less influence there than he thinks.
It becomes immediately clear that people skills are something everybody in the Trump administration lack. Trump might as well have gone himself if all he wanted to do was offend all our friends and embarrass us in front of the world.