Just in case you were getting ready to soften your view any of the Trump administration, what with how terrible the rest of the current crop of Republicans are, let me slow your roll a little bit and show you this video of Donald Trump’s son Eric on Fox and Friends, doing what he does best: Accidentally saying exactly what’s on his mind, even though it’s really, really horrible.
If you don’t remember what it’s like to watch Eric do a political bellyflop on live television, just try and recall that time he used a racial slur about Jews on the same show, to the shock and dismay of literally everyone except the alt-right crowd he’s a big part of.
This time around, the son Trump never wanted is answering a question about what to do with the small “issue” of US ally Saudi Arabia murdering journalists who are also government critics in order to silence them. We already expect that Eric will express little to no sympathy for the victim, Jamal Khashoggi, since his father has made exceedingly clear that he wishes the murder had never made it to the evening news. But the callous disregard for human life that Eric displays here is almost worse than even his dad, and that’s no small feat.
First, he acknowledges that it was a brutal, gruesome, horrific murder:
God knows what actually happened in that room, but whatever happened was, was clearly awful.”
But then we get to the problem for his father’s administration, which is that they want to keep selling them things, specifically weapons, so they can’t really hold them accountable for the horrifying things that they do to journalists who criticize the government:
We don’t have all that many friends in the Middle East, right? And you’ve got real problems in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has actually been a friend to the US in many ways, right? They’re ordering from us, massive, massive orders, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of arms and various things, which will create tens and tens of thousands of jobs, and so … it’s behavior that is savage and everything else. At the same time, who are our friends in the Middle East? The UAE, Israel, and Saudi… So what are you gonna do? You gonna take that and you’re gonna throw all of that away?”
Watch:
The answer to that, historically, has of course been yes. Yes, we distance ourselves from countries that commit human rights abuses. If we’re going to continue to have a soul as a nation, the answer is yes.
Unfortunately, Trump is more concerned with leaving a legacy of “tens of thousands of jobs” that he’d better hope people never realize came directly from ignoring Saudi Arabia’s brutality.
Featured image via screen capture
