New York Times columnist Bret Stephens took a swipe at his fellow conservatives for giving President Trump a pass when he appeared to side with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un over Joe Biden.
Trump said on Twitter Sunday he was amused after North Korean state media called the former vice president “reckless” and “a fool of low IQ.” At the same time, he also said he had confidence Kim Jong Un would follow through and denuclearize the Korean peninsula.
Stephens argued it was appalling that the president chose to side with a “psychotic or certainly murderous dictator against an honorable opponent.”
“It is a stunning repudiation of two centuries of American foreign policy tradition,” Stephens said during an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday.
Stephens then said he didn’t believe conservatives would be so forgiving of the remarks if a Democratic president made the same comments.
“It is amazing to me as someone who identifies as a conservative that so many of my fellow conservatives are just mum on the subject,” Stephens said. “Can you imagine for one second where Sean Hannity, where the crowd at Fox News would be, if any Democratic predecessor, President Obama or President Clinton, had uttered anything like this. They would be demanding impeachment on the spot. Here they are as silent and compliant as any group of ideologues and partisans have ever been.”
Amid backlash for his tweet, Trump said he was actually defending Biden for not calling him an “idiot.”
“I was actually sticking up for Sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil. Kim Jong Un called him a ‘low IQ idiot,’ and many other things, whereas I related the quote of Chairman Kim as a much softer ‘low IQ individual.’ Who could possibly be upset with that?” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign broke its silence on the matter Tuesday.
“It’s part of a pattern of embracing autocrats at the expense of our institutions — whether taking Putin’s word at face value in Helsinki or exchanging ‘love letters’ with Kim Jong Un,” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.
