DAVOS, Switzerland — President Trump didn’t say how delighted he was to be in Sweden, he didn’t call any countries s-holes, he didn’t threaten to “totally destroy” another nation, and he didn’t brag that his “nuclear button” was “much bigger” than anyone else’s. In other words, Trump’s speech here at the World Economic Forum was a resounding success.
O.K., fact-checkers found at least two falsehoods, and the audience booed when Trump went off script and raged at “how nasty, how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be.” Yet on the whole, he read an anodyne speech perfectly well off the teleprompter, making it a personal triumph for him — albeit also probably the weakest speech delivered by any leader in Davos this year.
The past week has underscored how much the world needs American leadership, and how badly Trump is falling short — or, more precisely, when he provides leadership, it’s often in the wrong direction, setting us back.
The upshot is that there’s now a global vacuum of practical and moral leadership.
There are challenges from North Korea to Yemen, from climate to refugees, plus atrocities in Myanmar that probably amount to genocide. South Sudan is collapsing, and in Syria, 16 bombings of hospitals or clinics have been reported just since Christmas — and barely an eyebrow has been raised.
Trump is a gift to the world’s tyrants in two important ways. First, he doesn’t typically stand up to them. Second, his tweets and outrages suck the oxygen from other important issues worldwide. (It’s fair to criticize us in the news media as well. Too often we’re like dogs yapping at everything that moves, distracted by the latest shiny Trumpian thing.)
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