Adam Kinzinger Rips ‘Awful President’ Trump For Being An Utter Disgrace

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In a new appearance on CNN, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) didn’t hold back in laying out the truth of how destructive that Donald Trump as president would have been in current circumstances, specifically involving the continuing war in Ukraine. It’s an argument that’s been repeatedly raised at this point: if only the Trump administration was still in power, then the strength emanating from it — or whatever — would have deterred Russian President Vladimir Putin from launching his invasion of Ukraine. As Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) recently put it, “Biden’s weakness was displayed for all the world to see with his embarrassing failures in Afghanistan. This is why, Putin invaded Ukraine, Iran is firing missiles at our consulate in Iraq, & China is dominating.” Trump’s imaginary aggression-deterring strength is the implied alternative here.

In reality, Trump’s time in power was marked by foreign policy failures. He antagonized allies with tariffs, launched a trade war with China that was paid for in significant part by American importers, failed to achieve the denuclearization of the North Korean regime despite high-profile summits, refused to act with fitting strictness against the Saudi individuals behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi… and the list goes on. Asked about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Kinzinger pointedly commented as follows:

‘[Trump] was an awful president, and he was awful on this issue. I mean, yeah there is something to the fact that nobody knew what Donald Trump was going to do, but that was just because he didn’t know what he was going to do. But that was not a deterrent to Putin. Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi of China were getting everything they wanted with Donald Trump. And I think, as John Bolton has said, Vladimir Putin was waiting until Donald Trump was re-elected and then pulled us out of NATO for this attack. And of course, with Joe Biden, he didn’t have that opportunity. Look, if anybody tries to look back and say that somehow Donald Trump would’ve been better at this, it is just utter garbage. And I think anybody in their right mind can’t truly believe that.’

Check out Kinzinger’s remarks below:

Trump is still running with the argument that he’s some kind of foreign policy genius; recently, he complained that “People forget so quickly, with the help of the Fake News, that it was me that got the 20 out of 28 delinquent NATO countries to start paying the money that they owed in order to rebuild a floundering NATO.” NATO, for starters, wasn’t “floundering” — and as of last June, it appears as though just 10 NATO member countries had hit a sought after level of spending 2 percent of their respective GDPs on defense, so it’s not clear what exactly Trump is talking about… sometimes his numbers appear to basically come from nowhere, which isn’t great for someone who was the United States president.