Donald Trump fully embraced his inner neocon before the United Nations today. He lashed out at North Korea, indicating that he was ready to ‘totally destroy’ it. He upbraided Iran as a corrupt and malignant regime that had taken America and its allies to the cleaners with the nuclear deal—’One of the worst and most one-sided transactions.’ And for good measure, he scoffed at various socialist regimes around the globe. The only term missing in his dyspeptic assessment of the carnage around the world was ‘axis of evil,’ the phrase that George W. Bush made famous when he decried Iran, North Korea and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks.
The language he deployed was seldom less than apocalyptic. Like Bush, he embraced the tone of moral superiority: ‘If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph.’ When it was not chiliastic, Trump indulged in snark, referring to ‘Rocket Man’ as being on a ‘suicide mission.’
There can be no doubting that the regimes Trump referred to are as nasty as they come.
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