Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said President-elect Donald Trump is an “empty vessel” whose language “about Christians versus Islam,” coupled with potentially moving the U.S.embassy to Jerusalem could provoke “an absolute crisis.”
Reid said, “Well, I think the problem with Trump is because he is an empty vessel, the danger in that is that the strong camps in Trump world are all troubling. You’ve got Putinism which Trump feels in his own gut, as you can hear when he speaks. He’s very pro-Putin. So the idea of turning over global leadership to Russia is troubling. The second piece is that Donald Trump is echoing this European sort of ethno-nationalist line that the far right parties in Europe are.”
“His language is not about specific countries that are our allies,” she continued. “It’s about Christians versus Islam. The sort of eliminationist almost language which says that we are in a war of civilizations and embracing that. Something George W. Bush never did. I think even with the mistakes George W. Bush made in foreign policy, he never did that. Trump is echoing that same sort of Christian nationalist line which puts us in a dangerous place when you also have this third piece which is his potential Israeli ambassador wanting to make provocative moves like moving the embassy to Jerusalem which could touch off a conflagration in the Muslim world. I’m not sure Donald Trump knows his mind enough to have a strategy to deal with an absolute crisis which he himself could provoke soon.”
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