Politics, it is said, ought to stop at the water’s edge. Not so for former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard, who trashed President Donald Trump and his administration in a visit to his former host country last week.
Gaspard, who now works for leftist megadonor George Soros as vice president of the Open Society Foundations, told South African foreign affairs journalist Patrick Gaspard that the U.S. was undergoing a “regression” similar to that of South Africa under President Jacob Zuma, whose unsteady government is rife with corruption.
The former ambassador complained about President Trump’s attacks on the media — leaving out, of course, the mainstream media’s ongoing effort to undermine a president whose election they tried desperately to prevent.
Other complaints included Trump’s refusal to condemn the popular Philippine president for his war against drug cartels, and to condemn the president of Turkey for his bodyguards’ assault on protesters in Washington, D.C.
Gaspard offered no explanation as to why the Obama administration was silent on human rights abuses throughout the world, and in fact eagerly courted the favor of the Turkish government during Obama’s “apology tour” in 2009.
His take on recent events in Charlottesville was similarly one-sided. He slammed Trump for allegedly equating white supremacists with protesters against them — when, in fact, Trump did no such thing. Rather, Trump pointed out the fact that both sides in Charlottesville used violence — something the left and media would rather ignore.
Gaspard traced polarization in the U.S. to the rise of conservative media, thanks to technologies that emerged in the 1990s. Ironically, the purpose of his trip to South Africa was “to launch a media innovation project.” (Perhaps Soros has found a way to make technology less divisive, and is testing it in the volatile South African political milieu.)
And he complained of the “attempt made to severely slash the US State Depatment budget” under the Trump administration.
Apparently Gaspard did not think the eagerness of a former diplomat to trash his country’s government abroad might further dampen public enthusiasm for lavish spending on State Department bureaucracy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.