Former Secretary of State Colin Powell unleashed on the Republican Party and White House officials for enabling President Trump and allowing United States foreign policy to devolve into “shambles.”
Speaking with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, the retired four-star general explained that he considers himself a Republican but has seen “things happening that are hard to understand” in the current Republican administration.
“I was a Republican who was Ronald Reagan’s national security advisory. I was a Republican who worked for George Herbert Walker Bush, and worked for George W. Bush. I’m a moderate Republican who believes that we should have strong foreign policy, strong defense policy, that we have to look out for our people, and we ought to work hard to making sure we’re one country and one team,” he said. “And so, on that basis, I call myself a Republican.”
He then laid into Republicans currently serving in office for failing to speak out against the president’s controversial actions.
“The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself. Right now, Republican leaders and members of the Congress, in both the Senate and in the House, are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out,” Powell said. “Will they lose a primary? I don’t know why that’s such a disaster, but will they lose a primary?
“And so, they need to get a grip, and when they see things that are not right they need to say something about it, because our foreign policy is in shambles right now in my humble judgment,” he added.
Next, Powell pointed to Trump reportedly using a sharpie to circle the state of Alabama on last month’s Hurricane Dorian forecast as an example of something that was “hard to understand.”
“And I see things happening that are hard to understand. A couple weeks ago the president put a circle around south east Alabama, saying it’s going to get hit by a hurricane. He put it on top of the meteorological prediction,” he said. “In my time, one of us would have gone to the president and said, ‘Mr President, you screwed up, so we’ve got to fix it, and we’ll put out a correction.’ You know what they did this time? They ordered the Commerce Department to go out and backup whatever the president mis-said. This is not the way the country’s supposed to run, and Congress is one of the institutions that should be doing something about this.”
Powell concluded, “The media has a role to play, we all have a role to play, you’ve got to remember that all these pieces are a part of our government. Executive branch, Congress, Supreme Court, and of the Fourth Estate, and we’ve got to remember that the Constitution started with, ‘We the People,’ not ‘Me the President.’”
Trump is currently facing an impeachment inquiry over allegations that he used his power as president to solicit 2020 election interference from a foreign government by asking the leader of Ukraine to investigate Democratic front-runner former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
On Thursday, the president suggested that China look into the Bidens as well, prompting criticism from many congressional Democrats. Republicans, however, have remained mostly silent or have taken to suggesting Trump was not being serious at the time. So far, just four Republicans have publicly condemned Trump’s call, including Sens. Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Ben Sasse, as well as Rep. Will Hurd.
