Donald Trump’s First Major Foreign Policy Speech Is Completely Devoid Of Substance
“Believe me, believe me,” he repeated after every vague promise to resolve threats to Israel.
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump promised 18,000 attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference Monday evening that he wouldn’t pander to them about Israel.
“That’s what politicians do. All talk, no action,” Trump told the pro-Israel lobbying group.
Then he spent the next 25 minutes pandering to Israel.
The speech was billed as the self-proclaimed billionaire’s first scripted, focused foreign policy address, coming hours after he
revealed his foreign policy team, which includes a former Blackwater executive and a former adviser to a Lebanese warlord.
In a shift from his usual meandering, unscripted riffs, Trump largely adhered to the pre-drafted
speech his campaign released in advance — with the exception of a dozen repetitions of “believe me,” apparently added to emphasize the trueness of his commitment. And while he managed not to drift into blanket denigrations of any gender, nationality or religion, his speech was largely a list of problems facing Israel, an insistence that President Barack Obama is to blame, and a promise to solve everything. He didn’t explain how he would do so.
It was a speech just unsophisticated enough to inspire bipartisan shoulder-shrugging.
“It was really a recitation of canned Republican talking points, designed to get applause from the crowd he was talking to,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group, J Street, said after the speech.
“As a policy speech, it’s meaningless,” conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a Trump critic, said on Fox News. “I don’t think it gives you any idea of what he would do as president.”
Though Trump’s speech was vague enough to confuse, his mere appearance was enough to offend some. Just before he took the stage, several rabbis stood up and silently exited the massive Verizon Center sports arena, congregating outside to study Jewish texts about human dignity.
“This particular candidate has crossed such lines of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia, of misogyny, that are out of bounds,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who was among the rabbis who walked out. “He’s legitimating hate. And we are the Jews … who have the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of the refugee experience. We can’t stand idly by.”
Pesner, like other objecting rabbis, insisted his gripe is with Trump, not AIPAC, which, as a lobbying organization, has reason to nurture ties with anyone who could be the next president. (The group made an exception in 2012, when it
did not invite GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul because of his opposition to foreign aid to Israel.)
Others, however, said the organization did a disservice by allowing Trump to speak.
