Conservative commentator Max Boot on Wednesday spelled out how he believes a second Donald Trump administration would “destroy the American-led world order.”
Boot, in his latest column for The Washington Post, argued that a rematch between the quadruply indicted former president and President Joe Biden in November’s election would be “a referendum not only on the future of American democracy but also on the future of America’s role in the world.”
Trump, the Republican front-runner for the 2024 nomination, “certainly undermined” America’s global leadership in his first term as he pretty much “veered from one blunder to another,” wrote Boot, who quit the GOP following Trump’s election in 2016.
In a second term, an unrestrained Trump and his “America First” policies would lead to “a chaotic post-American world where rogue states committed aggression with impunity, democracies cowered and trade ties frayed,” the pundit predicted.
“The conventional wisdom is that foreign policy doesn’t decide U.S. elections, but the choice has seldom been this scary or stark,” Boot concluded. “The November election will decide whether America continues its post-1945 internationalist foreign policy — or risks a return to the pre-Pearl Harbor policy of isolationism. How did that work out?”
Boot last year cautioned that Trump would likely be “10 times more dangerous” in a second term, because he wouldn’t “allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts.”
Biden is “a feeble vessel at best, but he’s the only realistic option we have,” Boot said at the time. “Anyone who believes in preserving American democracy and the U.S.-led world order, therefore, has no choice but to back Biden in 2024, however uninspiring that might be.”
Trump remains the clear leader of the GOP presidential primary field with poll numbers around 73%. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is polling at about 16%.