End to water’s edge: Trump and Biden have slammed each other overseas

“North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me,” Trump tweeted. “I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?”

Trump drew bipartisan scorn Sunday from Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and a more predictable Trump critic, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Each blasted Trump for acting naive about Kim’s nuclear intentions. And Kinzinger took issue with Trump’s comments about Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years and a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

“It’s Memorial Day Weekend and you’re taking a shot at Biden while praising a dictator. This is just plain wrong,” Kinzinger tweeted.

That gets at a longstanding notion of political behavior that’s more wishful thinking than reality — that partisanship “stops and the water’s edge” and leaders speak with one unified voice when abroad.

Top officials have regularly broken that rule in recent years, including Biden himself just recently.

On Feb. 16, speaking on German soil 75 years after the U.S. and its allies prepared for D-Day, Biden described America as “an embarrassment” and its trade policies “self-defeating.”

“The America I see values basic human decency, not snatching children from their parents or turning our back on refugees at our border. Americans know that’s not right,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference two months before launching his presidential bid. “The American people understand plainly that this makes us an embarrassment. The American people know, overwhelmingly, that it is not right. That it is not who we are.”

And back in the 2012 campaign, Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney traveled in the U.K., Poland, and Israel in a trip of implicit rebuke of the Obama administration’s foreign policy approach.

Early in George W. Bush’s presidency, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle wasn’t afraid to taunt the new commander-in-chief while on foreign soil. In July 2001, while Bush was in Europe meeting foreign leaders, the South Dakota Democrat delivered a biting critique of the administration’s foreign policy.

Less than two months before the 9/11 attacks upended the world order, Daschle said Bush’s policies were driving a wedge between the United States and its allies as well as eroding America’s leadership position in international affairs.

A few years earlier, House Speaker Newt Gingrich said of an August 1998 trip by President Bill Clinton to Russia to meet ailing leader Boris Yeltsin, ”These are two weak presidents trying to hold each other up,” the Georgia Republican chided Clinton, as the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominated headlines.

Still, Trump’s trans-Pacific jab at Biden represented the first time in recent memory that a president himself had been critical of a political rival while abroad. Commanders-in-chief usually take an above-the-fray approach while traveling internationally, so not to seem cheapened by petty domestic squabbles back home.

For some, the Sunday Trump-Biden fracas brought wistful memories of an earlier era of bipartisan foreign policy, real or imagined. Bill Kristol, a virulent Trump critic who is trying to recruit a 2020 Republican primary challenger to the incumbent, recalled his days as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. Quayle led a bipartisan delegation to the funeral of a former president of El Salvador, José Napoleón Duarte, which included a fierce political opponent, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., a liberal lion.

“Trump attacking Democrats in Japan reminds me of when VP Quayle took a bipartisan delegation on AF2 to Duarte’s funeral in 1990,” Kristol tweeted. “I still remember Ted Kennedy, before we landed, reminding his colleagues we were representing the U.S. and should leave political disagreements behind.”