CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Elizabeth Warren took a dig at President Trump hours after a key U.S. diplomat testified before Congress over the Ukraine affair.
The Massachusetts senator and 2020 Democratic White House hopeful turned a question about the central pillars of her foreign policy into a swing at Trump in Iowa on Wednesday, following Bill Taylor, America’s envoy to Ukraine, appearing before House impeachment investigators.
“Know the difference between our friends and our enemies,” she said. “You would never have dreamed you’d have to say an American president should not suck up to dictators. An American president should not go off and make impulsive decisions that the team doesn’t even know about.”
Taylor told lawmakers on Wednesday that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s representative to the European Union, informed Ukrainian officials they would not receive security assistance unless they investigated an oligarch-owned company that hired Vice President Joe Biden’s son.
Warren, 70, was asked about foreign policy during a town hall attended by about 700 people at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Rivals like Biden, 76, a longtime Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, see her lack of experience with international affairs as a weakness they can exploit as they vie for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Other than being able to identify allies, Warren, first elected to the Senate in 2012, said U.S. troops should not be deployed around the world “to try to do jobs that are not subject to a military solution,” pointing to diplomatic and economic tools.
The former Harvard Law School professor and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau advocate was also pressed on whether she would hire a secular outreach director for her campaign to balance the traditional religious outreach director as a gesture to atheists. Dodging the question, she said only that she was raised in a church where “the first thing I ever heard was the value of every single person.”
“It was always about respect for every person,” she told the crowd.
