Former top US official slams Trump for dividing, isolating country

New York: America’s two former top diplomats have slammed President Donald Trump for dividing the country, with one of them calling his foreign policy record as a blooper reel while asserting that the US deserves a president who is not a laughing stock around the world.

John Kerry, the former secretary of state, said on Tuesday at the virtual Democratic National Convention that Trump inherited a growing economy and a more peaceful world.

“…like everything else he inherited, he bankrupted it. When this president goes overseas, it isn’t a goodwill mission, it’s a blooper reel. He breaks up with our allies and writes love letters to dictators, Kerry said, making a reference to Trump writing to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“America deserves a president who is looked up to, not laughed at,” he said.

Emphasising that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden knows that even the United States of America needs friends on this planet, Kerry strongly criticised Trump for isolating the US on the world stage.

Before Donald Trump, we used to talk about American exceptionalism. The only thing exceptional about the incoherent Trump foreign policy is that it has made our nation more isolated than ever before. Joe Biden knows we aren’t exceptional because we bluster that we are; we are exceptional because we do exceptional things.

In a scathing attack on Trump, former secretary of state Colin Powell said America today is a divided country and we have a president doing everything in his power to make it that way and keep us that way.

Joe Biden will be a president we will all be proud to salute. With Joe Biden in the White House, you will never doubt that he will stand with our friends and stand up to our adversaries — never the other way around.

“He will trust our diplomats and our intelligence community, not the flattery of dictators and despots. He will make it his job to know when anyone dares to threaten us. He will stand up to our adversaries with strength and experience. They will know he means business, Powell said.

Powell said Biden will restore America’s leadership in the world and restore the alliances it needs to address the dangers that threaten the nation, from climate change to nuclear proliferation.

Kerry highlighted that the administration of former President Barack Obama and vice president Biden led by example for eight years, during when the US eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon, built a 68-nation coalition to destroy the ISIS, forged a 195-nation agreement to attack climate change and stopped Ebola before it became a pandemic.

Slamming Trump for pretending that Russia didn’t attack the US elections, Kerry said now the President does nothing about Moscow putting a bounty on American troops. “So he won’t defend our country. He doesn’t know how to defend our troops. The only person he’s interested in defending is himself.

Asserting that American interests, ideals and its brave men and women in uniform can’t afford four more years of Trump, Kerry said our troops can’t get out of harm’s way by hiding in the White House bunker. They need a president who will stand up for them. And President Biden will.

Kerry added that Biden’s moral compass has always pointed in the right direction, from the fight to break the back of apartheid to the struggle to wake up the world to genocide in the Balkans.

Biden “understands that none of the issues of this world, not nuclear weapons, not the challenge of building back better after COVID, not terrorism, and certainly not the climate crisis none can be resolved without bringing nations together.