Trump Administration
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, the most sacred, the most important, and the most profound responsibility that a President of the United States has is to keep Americans safe. Everything else that we care about--the citizens of this great Nation, the best Nation in the planet--matters very little if our physical safety and the physical safety of our families and our loved ones aren't assured. That is job No. 1 for the President of the United States.
I believe the President has likely committed offenses that are worthy of impeachment, and I think it is likely that information is going to emerge from the House's inquiry that would present Republicans with clear evidence that the President's abuse of office has been serious.
Obviously, we need to wait for the articles of impeachment to arrive in the Senate--if they do arrive--before any of us decide our vote on removal, but the publicly stipulated facts already surrounding the President's shadow foreign policy designed not to advance the national interests but his personal political interests are damning.
So far, my Republican friends have rallied to the President's side, despite public opinion moving pretty quickly against the President and in favor of an inquiry in the House. So today I want to use my time on the floor to ask just a simple question of my Republican colleagues. I want to ask what the costs are to the physical safety of the Nation of continuing to protect the President from the consequences of his misdeeds because as we gather in the Senate for our fall session, we are watching American national security policy go completely and fully off the rails. Our global reputation and our credibility have been shattered to pieces, and no one knows whether they can be reassembled. Our Nation's defenses have never been weaker. Our enemies are gathering strength by the day. Fear of American power is waning. Our global system of alliances is falling apart. Our friends are turning away from America because we are a demonstrably unreliable partner, and those friends may never come back.
Right now, before our eyes, American power is in a free fall, and our Nation's safety is at risk. American citizens are looking to this place for leadership, but when they lift up the hood looking for steely-eyed patriots, all they are finding are blind partisans. What is the cost, I ask my colleagues, of letting America continue to slide into global irrelevancy? How many American lives are going to be ultimately lost because we sat on the sidelines and we let American influence fade as our President becomes a toxic commodity, the butt of jokes, and an international pariah? What must it take for this body to put aside party and come together to salvage our shrinking American security?
I want to take a few moments--a few more than I normally take when I come down to the floor--to take my colleagues on a tour of the world right now just so everybody understands how dangerous the situation has gotten, to understand just how broad the scope of our foreign policy dysfunction is right now, because just maybe--maybe--if you see the crisis all in one map, all in one summary, my colleagues might wake up to the magnitude of this emergency.
It is hard to start anywhere but in the Ukraine. The power of the American executive branch has no equal. No individual in the world has more power than Donald Trump has today. That power comes with responsibility and guardrails.
The one firm promise that a President must make to those he governs is to use the powers of the Oval Office for the national interest and not for his personal or financial interest. But it is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt after all this testimony--much of it from Republicans before the House--that President Trump has turned our support for Ukraine into a personal poker chip to be cashed in in order to get Ukraine to help him destroy his political rivals. This just isn't allowed in a democracy.
The damage done by Trump's corruption of the Ukraine relationship is far beyond this broken covenant with the American people. He pulled essential assistance to Ukraine just when their new President needed U.S. support the most. Trump has weakened Ukraine dramatically by pulling them into this mess, and Russia is the beneficiary. Make no mistake--Putin has won for the time being, and those fighting for democracy have lost for the time being, sold out by their fair-weather American friends who are more interested in destroying the President's political opponents than supporting Ukraine.
Now, other nations on Russia's and China's periphery, wondering whether to simply acquiesce to the bullying dominance of their neighbors or put up a fight for independence, now are less likely to do the latter, knowing that the United States is there only to help if their nation fulfills our President's personal requests.
The world's eyes this week are down here in Syria, where the President has engaged in one of the worst, most abominable acts of double-cross in the history of the American Presidency. We convinced the Kurdish military to fight ISIS forces for us. We convinced them to take down their defense against a potential Turkish invasion because we promised to protect them. And then, out of nowhere, a week and a half ago, Trump stabbed the Kurds in the back. He announced the pullback of our forces and invited by press release the Turkish army to march into Syria and destroy our ally, the Kurds, whom today he has denigrated by telling the world that they are not actually as good fighters as everybody says they are.
The damage to our Nation's security done by this one single act is almost too comprehensive to list in one speech. ISIS detainees have escaped their jail cells and are now likely reconstituting and possibly readying new attacks against the United States. They can plot without fear of interruption because the Kurds have ended their fight against ISIS to try to survive this Turkish offensive.
Now, in addition to ISIS, Russia, the Syrian regime, and the Iranians all grew stronger in Syria overnight as we stood down, and they will quickly reap the benefits of Trump's abandonment of the Kurds. It is a nightmare in Syria today, and it is going to get much worse before it gets better.
Let's move down to China, where President-for-life Xi Jinping has been steadily consolidating power, building a model of totalitarian control that denies basic human rights to its population of 1.4 billion. The United States has watched from the sidelines as China not only conducts cultural genocide against its Muslim population in its own country but also grows its global clout and exports its model and technology of repression around the world.
China's military continues to gain in strength and push their unlawful territorial claims further in the Western Pacific. We do virtually nothing. China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging linkages across the globe, building foundations for long-term technological, economic, and strategic dominance.
The United States stands on the sidelines under the Trump administration. The sum total of our bilateral interactions thus far with China has been a bungled, disastrous, job-killing trade war. It is a trade war that really only made sense in Trump's campaign speeches but never had a chance to succeed without the help of other potential partners that the President never tried to enlist.
Every single day, Trump is losing the trade war badly. Our trade deficit with China isn't going down; it is going up. The tariffs on Chinese imports could cost middle-class American consumers $1,000 a year, and our economy has slowed down and is on its way to potentially losing 300,000 jobs because of the trade war. It is an unmitigated economic disaster for our Nation, and this nightmare, like all the others, seems to be getting worse. All the while, China forges ahead to corner the market on next-generation technologies like 5G, drones, and artificial intelligence, leaving America and American companies potentially shut out of these markets.
Nowhere has China's heavyhanded repression been more apparent than right here in Hong Kong. Yet again, we have been totally absent. In Hong Kong, brave, pro-democracy protesters should be seen as America's best friends--Chinese people who are risking everything to fight for basic freedoms in an increasingly totalitarian state. There is no better way to undermine China's unfair trade model than to promote the rights of its consumers and its citizens. But Trump promised the Chinese regime that he would offer no support to the Hong Kong protesters--an unconscionable promise that he has kept--while China runs circles around him on trade talks.
Staying in Asia, let's run right up the road to the most immediate and terrifying existential threat: a nuclear-armed homicidal dictator with the capacity and willingness to nuke us and our allies in the region--North Korea. A lot of ink has been spilled on the pomp and circumstance of Trump's summits and the ongoing love affair that he claims with Kim Jong Un, but what has actually been the result of nearly 3 years of Trump's North Korean diplomacy besides stroking his ego? The answer is nothing. Kim continues to fire missiles into the Sea of Japan. He continues to quietly build his nuclear stockpile. Even the freeze on nuclear long-range missile tests is temporary, and the North Koreans are warning they might resume that at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, we abandoned the South Koreans, we canceled our joint military exercises, and we nearly withdrew our troops entirely. Kim got international recognition and essentially a free pass to keep building his arsenal and making it more deadly while we weakened all of our regional alliances. America and the world are dramatically less safe right now.
All over the world, in fact, dictators and would-be dictators are racking up stunning records of human rights abuses right now because they know that under President Trump, America will really raise no issue and no protests.
Go down here to the Philippines, for instance, where there have been 20,000 people who have vanished in the extrajudicial massacres by President Duterte. No protests from the United States, and 20,000 have vanished.
Thousands of political dissidents are being locked up in places like Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia--these are supposed U.S. allies--and have no one to speak for them because America now doesn't do anything about civil rights or human rights. We have vanished from the human rights playing field.
In Saudi Arabia, in fact, their leadership felt so emboldened by Trump's embrace of brutal strongmen that they kidnapped an American resident who was critical of the Saudi regime. They chopped him to pieces, and then they got rid of the body parts. The dots are piling up in the Middle East. The response from the United States to Jamal Khashoggi's murder was a visit to Riyadh by the American Secretary of State for a smiling photo op to make sure that every foreign leader in every corner of the world recognized that human rights abuses would be forgiven pretty immediately by this new American regime.
Elsewhere in the Middle East--I don't know that I can just keep on piling up more and more dots, but elsewhere in the Middle East, things are falling apart fast due mostly to the Trump administration's incompetence. It started with this nonsensical fracture of relations between Saudi Arabia and another key U.S. Gulf ally, Qatar. It was the kind of disruption that, frankly, would normally be papered over and fixed by a competent U.S. administration probably in days, but 3 years later, the two countries--Saudi Arabia and Qatar--still aren't talking, largely because we did nothing to fix it. Making matters worse, Saudi Arabia and their one remaining friend in the region, UAE, aren't getting along now either.
Under Trump, the war in Yemen began to rage out of control. Tens of thousands of innocent Yemenis, many of them little children, died needlessly as Trump piled more weapons and more bombs into the war and did really nothing to try to find a peace agreement between the parties who for a year had been begging the United States to step in and play a traditional role as mediator. The conflict has raged on for so long due to Trump's unwillingness to use America's diplomatic muscle that events on the ground have become so chaotic that the Saudis and the Emiratis have now parted ways. Now, with the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Emiratis all on different wavelengths, the potential for proxy wars between these wealthy nations could get much worse all over the Middle East.
In Iran, right next door, the campaign of blind escalation and provocation has been disastrous. Every one of the President's national security advisors told him to stay in the Iran nuclear agreement and focus his energies on addressing Iran's other malevolent behavior in the region, like their ballistic missile program or their support for terrorist organizations. Trump ignored all his advisors, like he has ignored all the rest of the counsel he has received on major foreign policy matters, and he canceled the agreement and implemented a series of unilateral sanctions against Iran. He coordinated with absolutely no one.
Now, Iran, feeling cornered but also not feeling particularly vulnerable, given the fact that America couldn't recruit any of our friends to our new anti-Iran campaign, hit back against oil tankers, American drones, and Saudi pipelines. We now seem perpetually on the precipice of war with Iran. Meanwhile, they have restarted parts of their shuttered nuclear program. We haven't convinced a single nation to help us build new sanctions, and there is absolutely no chance that Trump is going to secure a better deal than the JCPOA before he leaves office in just over a year.
Iran is a bigger menace than before he took office. They just scored another major victory with Trump's abandonment of the Kurds, and an anti-Iran coalition that the United States methodically built under Barack Obama has vanished, perhaps never again to be resurrected.
In this very red region of the world right now, the only leader who has been happy with Trump's dangerous, bizarre, nonstrategy on Iran has been Benjamin Netanyahu, but he may not be in power much longer, and his alliance with Trump has left his successor a frightening legacy. Under Trump's watch, the two-state solution in Israel--a longtime bipartisan lynchpin of American policy in the Middle East--has effectively fallen apart.
Trump has allowed Israel to take steps that make a future Palestinian state almost impossible. For 3 years, he has put his son-in-law--whose only experience was using his father's money to buy real estate--in charge of brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a joke. Everybody knew it, but since Trump was President, everybody had to play along. Now there is no peace plan. There was never going to be a peace plan, and the chances for one are almost nonexistent after 3 years of the Trump administration.
Down in Libya, Trump admittedly inherited a pretty miserable situation, but somehow, like everything else, he managed to make it worse. The country has been fractured for years, as rival militias with a host of foreign patrons have been fighting a civil war that has created a vacuum that has been filled in by extremists and a migrant crisis that continues to expand. But instead of doing the hard work of diplomacy to try to get the warring parties back to the table, instead, Trump threw his support--his personal support--behind General Haftar, upending years of American diplomacy and endorsing Haftar's plan to try to take Tripoli by force. As a result, the fighting there continues, peace talks are failing, and the humanitarian crisis grows by the day.
One of the consequences of this Trump death spiral in Libya and the Middle East is that the economic and political refugees continue to flow into Europe, which simply isn't politically ready to accept this rate of inflow, and by slashing the number of refugees allowed in the United States from over 100,000 to 18,000, we have communicated to the Europeans that we have no interest in helping. Just like everything else, Trump has made the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants into Europe even harder by serving as a model for racist, xenophobic demagogues, and rightwing nationalist political parties who want to bring Trump's form of political nativism into Europe.
Nationalist political parties are on the rise all across the West, and Trump is absolutely central to their development. He gravitates not toward Angela Merkel, whose courageous leadership has held the EU together through all these crises, but he hews to Viktor Orban, who has stoked the embers of nationalism to take Hungary down a dark path. Trump and his nationalist compatriots weaponize these fears of immigration and cultural change to justify really bad policies--from labeling journalists as enemies of the state to putting kids in cages. And when rightwing groups try to copy Trump's success and deploy his playbook in countries all throughout Europe, he doesn't stand up and object, as the leader of the free world should; he offers a wink and a nod or sometimes a warm embrace.
Trump doesn't stop there in his deliberate attempts to undermine European democracy. He has carried out a systematic, purposeful campaign to weaken the European Union and NATO. By now, we have all grown used to Trump's attacks on globalism, but it is still pretty extraordinary that we have a President who just doesn't attack the specific institutions he loathes, such as the U.N., the EU, or NATO; he levies regular broadsides against the entire concept of global cooperation. He sees multilateralism as a weakness, and his cheerleading of Britain out the door of the EU and his constant attacks on NATO, even to the point of wondering out loud if the United States would defend allies if attacked risks taking down the entire post-World War II order. That would be a disaster for us and a gift to countries like China, Russia, India, and nonstate actors such as al-Qaida and ISIS.
When it comes to our relations with Europe, Trump reserves his greatest multilateral animus for global attempts to address climate change. The Paris Agreement wasn't even a binding commitment on the United States, but Trump felt so strongly that climate change was a Chinese-perpetrated hoax--unwind that riddle for me--that he pulled us out of the agreement in a big, grand, festive ceremony at the White House.
Global climate catastrophe is coming if we don't do anything. In fact, it is already here. The story of Syria's descent into madness can partially be told through the tale of successive global warming- connected droughts that forced farmers into overcrowded cities that weren't ready for those population surges. Trump's hostility to climate action is one of his most unforgiveable global legacies, and the next President may not have enough time or political capital to make up the ground we have lost on climate change, especially with European partners.
Speaking of failure to capitalize on opportunities, let's spin the globe back to our own hemisphere, where, according to the script, things couldn't be going much worse. Here in the Americas everything that Trump has touched thus far has fallen apart, and the United States is weaker regionally than ever before.
Trump's nativism is his political calling card, but his own policies seem to encourage more migration to the United States, not less of it. President Trump's decision to cut off foreign assistance to Central American countries because they weren't doing enough to stop migration is lunacy. President Obama's program of investing in Central American security so that less of their citizens felt the need to flee to America was beginning to work, and Trump gave it all away simply to provide fuel to his domestic political agenda.
Further south, U.S.-Venezuela policy is one of the few times Trump's Presidency stood up to a dictator. Unfortunately, because Trump doesn't know how to do foreign policy, he botched that intervention too. It has been really embarrassing to watch this administration repeatedly and wrongly claim that the Maduro regime is on the verge of collapse. They did it in January, when Juan Guaido swore himself in as interim President. They did it again in February, when they said deploying American aid along the border would trigger the regime's fall, and they did it again in April in a lead-up to a military uprising that went nowhere. The White House has engaged in tough talk only to see Maduro's hold on power endure.
Trump played all his cards on this crisis right in the first few days, like a nervous teenager. Now we are left sanctioning the Venezuelan people and recognizing a leader of the country who isn't really the leader of that country and probably isn't going to be the leader of that country. It is yet another failure that makes us look weak and foolish. We make a play and can't back it up. It is hard to be scared of the United States when everything we try to do goes wrong.
Let's move back over to the African Continent for a moment. Now, as a candidate, Trump repeatedly stoked fears of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, tweeting that the United States ``must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start to spread inside our borders!'' Of course, this didn't make any sense, and it doesn't make any sense now. We have known for ages that travel bans aren't actually the best way to deal with an outbreak of disease, but since he has become President, the Trump administration has asked Congress to rescind $252 million that had been put aside to deal with the virus. He ousted the NSC's top biodefense expert and repeatedly sought to slash funding for global health programs. Sadly, Trump's default response to epidemics and barriers of exclusion, defunding preventive measures, and opting to feed panic rather than deploy an orderly response that is driven by science and led by scientists only hurts our ability to control outbreaks that are present today and in the future.
Finally, Denmark. Trump managed to even screw up our relationship with Denmark, which many of us would have thought was impossible. Out of an episode of ``The Simpsons,'' Trump canceled a diplomatic meeting with Denmark's leader because they wouldn't agree to sell us Greenland. It sounds funny, but it is an example of the relatively small things compared to the big world screw-ups that happen every day that only get a few days of media attention.
Denmark is one of our strongest NATO allies. At the height of the war in Afghanistan, they had one of the highest numbers of troops per capita fighting alongside us. They hold the key to blocking a Russian gas pipeline that could avoid Ukraine, damaging their economy, and come into Europe, but now we have managed to even make Denmark an adversary. I know it sounds implausible, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is a policy massacre everywhere. The world is on fire, and in most places Trump is one of the arsonists. Meanwhile, who is benefiting? Across the board, America's enemies and our competitors are rubbing their hands with delight as we score own goal after own goal. Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Kim, the hard-liners in Iran, could not have scripted a better opportunity to gain power for themselves at our expense.
I say that Trump's foreign policy is a global joke, but calling what he does policy is probably unfair. He doesn't really care to take the time to learn about the world. He doesn't read his briefings. He makes it up day by day, with his personal political priorities, his jealousies, and his headline addiction guiding his decisions rather than anything connected to our actual national security interests. Our foreign policy is in complete, utter, total meltdown, and it is time for all of us to face facts.
You can't impeach a President because you disagree with their policies, but this is beyond a policy disagreement. This is a President who has compromised our Nation's integrity and our credibility, who has put in jeopardy the safety of our citizens, especially as ISIS breaks out of detainment and looks to regroup to threaten America again in Syria.
These kinds of things--the perversion of the powers of the Presidency--are not allowed in a democracy. Our refusal to accept this kind of behavior is what separates us from all the tin-pot dictatorships around the world.
I hope, eventually, my Republican colleagues see this, but I also want my Republican colleagues who spend their time thinking of themselves as bulwarks of national security to see the damage, much of it irreparable, that Trump is doing to our position in the world. Why continue to offer him this unconditional protection from an impeachment inquiry if the cost of his staying in office is the shattering of our reputation around the world?
Why continue to defend him if his actions everywhere are causing the world to fall apart--and it is falling apart in every part of the globe. Everything this administration has touched has gotten worse. The scariest part is that this President and this administration still have 14 more months to do even more damage.
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