“I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me,” he said, “but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America.”

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball writes,

The question of which—naïveté or disingenuousness—brings me to President Trump’s statement about our relations with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist who observed that in many ways the statement “captured Trump’s view of the world and foreign policy” was right. It is a neat summary of Trump’s doctrine of “principled realism,” where the principle in question turns first of all on what is best for the United States and the realism frankly acknowledges the exigencies, economic and military, that determine the actual congress among nations. President Trump’s statement opens with the injunction “America First!” followed by the admonition “The world is a very dangerous place!”

These are the sorts of observations that drive the Left to distraction. How uncouth that the president of the United States should publicly favor his own country over others! And how unutterably gauche that he should employ exclamation marks in official statements! The Washington Post, for example, decried that president’s communication as a “crude statement” that “casually slandered Mr. Khashoggi, who was one of the Arab world’s most distinguished journalists.”

In fact, Khashoggi was a Sharia-supporting member of the Muslim Brotherhood with deep ties to Osama bin Laden’s organization and other radical groups, which is not to suggest that his bizarre murder was justified, only that that rose-colored glasses that venues such as the Washington Post donned when describing him are even more distorting than usual.

...The president acknowledged that there were some members of Congress who dissented from his perspective. That, he said, is their prerogative. And here is the kicker: “I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me,” he said, “but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America.”

That, I submit, is the voice of an adult, someone who understands that the job of the president of the United States is to look after the interests of the United States, not have one’s knickers in a perpetual twist because bad people do bad things in other parts of the world.

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