Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, a former Fox News analyst, said he was "relieved" watching President Donald Trump's speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, if only because it could have gone much worse.
Moments into his speech, the U.S. president was met with laughter after he bragged that his administration had accomplished more over two years than "almost any administration" in American history.
Members of the audience could be heard guffawing at the claim, taking the president by surprise. "Didn't expect that reaction, but that's OK," he said, eliciting more laughter from the crowd.
In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Peters said that while it was "pretty grim" to see "the world laughing at and mocking the U.S. president," he wasn't surprised. "That's where we are," he said.
Peters took some solace in the fact that the speech could have gone worse. "When I listened to the speech this morning, there was much to worry about, but I have to say, that at the end of the day I was a little bit relieved, because...instead of getting the Black Death we just got influenza," he said.
Peters did hit back at Trump's decision to praise North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for his "courage," calling it "just plain nutty" as he warned about how much weight the U.S. president's words carry.
Peters also expressed worry over Trump's blurring of the lines between "honorable patriotism" to "rabid nationalism. When Trump kept going on and on and on about patriotism and sovereignty, patriotism and sovereignty, words mean different things to different people in different countries and cultures.
"To us, patriotism, we think defending our country. It's a good thing. Sovereignty, of course we want a sovereign nation with controlled borders. But in much of the world, when we say––when Trump says––patriotism and sovereignty, they hear nationalism and basically that they're impermeable to blame, that they can get away with whatever they want within their own countries," Peters said.
"There is a line somewhere out there, it's a little fuzzy, between honorable patriotism and rabid nationalism, and when Trump preaches what amounts to extreme nationalism, you're dragging the world back toward the 20th century, back toward the 1920s and 1930s," Peters said.
He laid some of the blame for Trump's speech on the shoulders of the president's speechwriters, saying they are "mediocre at best" and "have no command of language."
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Chantal Da Silva is Chief Correspondent at Newsweek, with a focus on immigration and human rights. She is a Canadian-British journalist whose work ... Read more
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