The Washington Post, amplified by WTOP's editorial roundup, wants you panicked: Donald Trump treats adversaries "more kindly" than America's "oldest friends," and the result will be nuclear proliferation across the globe. The shared language across establishment outlets—"U.S. unreliability," "undermining credibility," "allies cannot count"—tells you everything about who they're worried about, and it isn't you.
The WaPo editorial, reprinted in WTOP's roundup, catalogs Trump's sins: rolling out the red carpet for Xi while holding a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan; inviting Putin to the G-20 in Florida; musing about buying potash from Belarus instead of Canada; threatening to cut diesel exports to Europe ahead of winter; reducing joint military exercises with South Korea. The implied threat in every paragraph is the same: if America doesn't keep writing checks and deploying troops, the world will arm itself with nukes.
What every editorial board agreed to omit: the price tag. That $14 billion Taiwan arms package is American taxpayer money. The diesel Americans might need this winter. The weapons stockpiles being burned through in what WaPo quietly calls the "inconclusive Iran war"—a conflict these same editorial boards cheered the U.S. into. Nearly 70 percent of South Koreans now support building their own nuclear arsenal, according to polls cited in the WaPo editorial. The Post frames this as a crisis of American credibility. An honest account would ask: if South Korea wants nukes, maybe South Korea should pay for its own defense.
The editorial even admits, in a telling aside, that "prompting allies to become stronger and more self-reliant, as the U.S. has been urging for years, is desirable"—before immediately contradicting itself by calling the means of achieving that goal a threat to U.S. credibility. You can't have it both ways, but the establishment press always tries.
Meanwhile, the domestic flank of the same fight gets different treatment. HotAir reports that Trump appears to be finally turning on Rep. Maria Salazar, the Florida Republican who ran a campaign ad attacking his immigration enforcement. For months, Trump endorsed Salazar despite her amnesty positions, telling reporters she'd gotten "a little bit soft on the border" but keeping his support. This week, Trump's media account posted a Washington Post story showing a majority of Hispanic Miami voters back the president's ideas—using the very establishment outlet attacking his foreign policy to undercut a Republican attacking his domestic policy.
The open question: if Trump is willing to let foreign allies fend for themselves, will he apply the same standard to the open-borders Republicans in his own party?
