During a Tuesday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to promote their book “The Divider,” writers Peter Baker and Susan Glasser shocked staff members by sharing examples concerning Donald Trump’s complete ignorance of global events and even geography.
When asked about Trump’s problems with prior presidents by co-host Jonathan Lemire, the two authors shared a story about the former president’s promise to hand up the West Bank.
“There is so much about his meetings with Putin in Helsinki, his efforts to walk out of NATO,” host Lemire began. “This headline, which took my breath away when I read it over the weekend, that he nearly gave away the West Bank — tell us how that could have happened.”
“We decided to do this book after he left office because there was more to learn,” Baker admitted.
“One was the great anecdote where apparently Trump calls up [former Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin at the Davos conference when he’s meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan and put him on the phone, and said, ‘Hey king, I’ve got a great deal for you, I’m going to give you the West Bank.’ And anybody who understands Jordan where the Palestinian population is sort of a restive force in politics there and understands that was not anything King Abdullah wanted.”
“He told an American friend, ‘I nearly had a heart attack, I doubled over, I couldn’t breathe,'” Baker continued.
“It went to where Donald Trump’s view of the world is very superficial and transactional — and he is simply going to give the king something the king has no interest in having.”
“It explains a lot about his foreign policy, which was very, very much built on the basis of someone who didn’t spend a single day in the office prior to becoming president and he had a lot to learn, ” he elaborated.
“He didn’t know the difference between the Baltics and Balkans. One aide was saying he knew nothing about so many things, it was startling to them even after they spent time in his presence.”
Even though Donald Trump served as president for only four years, his era and aura seem to go on forever, unlike past one-term leaders. His hold on the Republican Party seems to be as tight as ever, and his insistence on his superiority is unwavering.
He refuses to even admit defeat and believes that he has the right to carry on as normal. And more than a third of the population claims to support him.
His attempts to rig the 2020 election were not the start or the end of the threat to democracy described in these pages.
Trump “came from a seven-million-vote setback, two impeachments, and the January 6 rebellion as the dominating force in the Republican Party,” the writers of The Divided write in their Epilogue.
