[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 163 (Wednesday, October 16, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5817-S5820]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Trump Administration

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, the most sacred, the most important, and 
the most profound responsibility that a President of the United States 
has is to keep Americans safe. Everything else that we care about--the 
citizens of this great Nation, the best Nation in the planet--matters 
very little if our physical safety and the physical safety of our 
families and our loved ones aren't assured. That is job No. 1 for the 
President of the United States.
  I believe the President has likely committed offenses that are worthy 
of impeachment, and I think it is likely that information is going to 
emerge from the House's inquiry that would present Republicans with 
clear evidence that the President's abuse of office has been serious.
  Obviously, we need to wait for the articles of impeachment to arrive 
in the Senate--if they do arrive--before any of us decide our vote on 
removal, but the publicly stipulated facts already surrounding the 
President's shadow foreign policy designed not to advance the national 
interests but his personal political interests are damning.
  So far, my Republican friends have rallied to the President's side, 
despite public opinion moving pretty quickly against the President and 
in favor of an inquiry in the House. So today I want to use my time on 
the floor to ask just a simple question of my Republican colleagues. I 
want to ask what the costs are to the physical safety of the Nation of 
continuing to protect the President from the consequences of his 
misdeeds because as we gather in the Senate for our fall session, we 
are watching American national security policy go completely and fully 
off the rails. Our global reputation and our credibility have been 
shattered to pieces, and no one knows whether they can be reassembled. 
Our Nation's defenses have never been weaker. Our enemies are gathering 
strength by the day. Fear of American power is waning. Our global 
system of alliances is falling apart. Our friends are turning away from 
America because we are a demonstrably unreliable partner, and those 
friends may never come back.
  Right now, before our eyes, American power is in a free fall, and our 
Nation's safety is at risk. American citizens are looking to this place 
for leadership, but when they lift up the hood looking for steely-eyed 
patriots, all they are finding are blind partisans. What is the cost, I 
ask my colleagues, of letting America continue to slide into global 
irrelevancy? How many American lives are going to be ultimately lost 
because we sat on the sidelines and we let American influence fade as 
our President becomes a toxic commodity, the butt of jokes, and an 
international pariah? What must it take for this body to put aside 
party and come together to salvage our shrinking American security?
  I want to take a few moments--a few more than I normally take when I 
come down to the floor--to take my colleagues on a tour of the world 
right now just so everybody understands how dangerous the situation has 
gotten, to understand just how broad the scope of our foreign policy 
dysfunction is right now, because just maybe--maybe--if you see the 
crisis all in one map, all in one summary, my colleagues might wake up 
to the magnitude of this emergency.
  It is hard to start anywhere but in the Ukraine. The power of the 
American executive branch has no equal. No individual in the world has 
more power than Donald Trump has today. That power comes with 
responsibility and guardrails.
  The one firm promise that a President must make to those he governs 
is to use the powers of the Oval Office for the national interest and 
not for his personal or financial interest. But it is now clear beyond 
a reasonable doubt after all this testimony--much of it from 
Republicans before the House--that President Trump has turned our 
support for Ukraine into a personal poker chip to be cashed in in order 
to get Ukraine to help him destroy his political rivals. This just 
isn't allowed in a democracy.
  The damage done by Trump's corruption of the Ukraine relationship is 
far beyond this broken covenant with the American people. He pulled 
essential assistance to Ukraine just when their new President needed 
U.S. support the most. Trump has weakened Ukraine dramatically by 
pulling them into this mess, and Russia is the beneficiary. Make no 
mistake--Putin has won for the time being, and those fighting for 
democracy have lost for the time being, sold out by their fair-weather 
American friends who are more interested in destroying the President's 
political opponents than supporting Ukraine.
  Now, other nations on Russia's and China's periphery, wondering 
whether to simply acquiesce to the bullying dominance of their 
neighbors or put up a fight for independence, now are less likely to do 
the latter, knowing that the United States is there only to help if 
their nation fulfills our President's personal requests.
  The world's eyes this week are down here in Syria, where the 
President has engaged in one of the worst, most abominable acts of 
double-cross in the history of the American Presidency. We convinced 
the Kurdish military to fight ISIS forces for us. We convinced them to 
take down their defense against a potential Turkish invasion because we 
promised to protect them. And then, out of nowhere, a week and a half 
ago, Trump stabbed the Kurds in the back. He announced the pullback of 
our forces and invited by press release the Turkish army to march into 
Syria and destroy our ally, the Kurds, whom today he has denigrated by 
telling the world that they are not actually as good fighters as 
everybody says they are.
  The damage to our Nation's security done by this one single act is 
almost too comprehensive to list in one speech. ISIS detainees have 
escaped their jail cells and are now likely reconstituting and possibly 
readying new attacks against the United States. They can plot without 
fear of interruption because the Kurds have ended their fight against 
ISIS to try to survive this Turkish offensive.
  Now, in addition to ISIS, Russia, the Syrian regime, and the Iranians 
all grew stronger in Syria overnight as we stood down, and they will 
quickly reap the benefits of Trump's abandonment of the Kurds. It is a 
nightmare in Syria today, and it is going to get much worse before it 
gets better.
  Let's move down to China, where President-for-life Xi Jinping has 
been steadily consolidating power, building a model of totalitarian 
control that denies basic human rights to its population of 1.4 
billion. The United States has watched from the sidelines as China not 
only conducts cultural genocide against its Muslim population in its 
own country but also grows its global clout and exports its model and 
technology of repression around the world.
  China's military continues to gain in strength and push their 
unlawful territorial claims further in the Western Pacific. We do 
virtually nothing. China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging

[[Page S5818]]

linkages across the globe, building foundations for long-term 
technological, economic, and strategic dominance.
  The United States stands on the sidelines under the Trump 
administration. The sum total of our bilateral interactions thus far 
with China has been a bungled, disastrous, job-killing trade war. It is 
a trade war that really only made sense in Trump's campaign speeches 
but never had a chance to succeed without the help of other potential 
partners that the President never tried to enlist.
  Every single day, Trump is losing the trade war badly. Our trade 
deficit with China isn't going down; it is going up. The tariffs on 
Chinese imports could cost middle-class American consumers $1,000 a 
year, and our economy has slowed down and is on its way to potentially 
losing 300,000 jobs because of the trade war. It is an unmitigated 
economic disaster for our Nation, and this nightmare, like all the 
others, seems to be getting worse. All the while, China forges ahead to 
corner the market on next-generation technologies like 5G, drones, and 
artificial intelligence, leaving America and American companies 
potentially shut out of these markets.
  Nowhere has China's heavyhanded repression been more apparent than 
right here in Hong Kong. Yet again, we have been totally absent. In 
Hong Kong, brave, pro-democracy protesters should be seen as America's 
best friends--Chinese people who are risking everything to fight for 
basic freedoms in an increasingly totalitarian state. There is no 
better way to undermine China's unfair trade model than to promote the 
rights of its consumers and its citizens. But Trump promised the 
Chinese regime that he would offer no support to the Hong Kong 
protesters--an unconscionable promise that he has kept--while China 
runs circles around him on trade talks.
  Staying in Asia, let's run right up the road to the most immediate 
and terrifying existential threat: a nuclear-armed homicidal dictator 
with the capacity and willingness to nuke us and our allies in the 
region--North Korea. A lot of ink has been spilled on the pomp and 
circumstance of Trump's summits and the ongoing love affair that he 
claims with Kim Jong Un, but what has actually been the result of 
nearly 3 years of Trump's North Korean diplomacy besides stroking his 
ego? The answer is nothing. Kim continues to fire missiles into the Sea 
of Japan. He continues to quietly build his nuclear stockpile. Even the 
freeze on nuclear long-range missile tests is temporary, and the North 
Koreans are warning they might resume that at the end of the year.
  Meanwhile, we abandoned the South Koreans, we canceled our joint 
military exercises, and we nearly withdrew our troops entirely. Kim got 
international recognition and essentially a free pass to keep building 
his arsenal and making it more deadly while we weakened all of our 
regional alliances. America and the world are dramatically less safe 
right now.
  All over the world, in fact, dictators and would-be dictators are 
racking up stunning records of human rights abuses right now because 
they know that under President Trump, America will really raise no 
issue and no protests.
  Go down here to the Philippines, for instance, where there have been 
20,000 people who have vanished in the extrajudicial massacres by 
President Duterte. No protests from the United States, and 20,000 have 
vanished.

  Thousands of political dissidents are being locked up in places like 
Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia--these are supposed U.S. allies--and 
have no one to speak for them because America now doesn't do anything 
about civil rights or human rights. We have vanished from the human 
rights playing field.
  In Saudi Arabia, in fact, their leadership felt so emboldened by 
Trump's embrace of brutal strongmen that they kidnapped an American 
resident who was critical of the Saudi regime. They chopped him to 
pieces, and then they got rid of the body parts. The dots are piling up 
in the Middle East. The response from the United States to Jamal 
Khashoggi's murder was a visit to Riyadh by the American Secretary of 
State for a smiling photo op to make sure that every foreign leader in 
every corner of the world recognized that human rights abuses would be 
forgiven pretty immediately by this new American regime.
  Elsewhere in the Middle East--I don't know that I can just keep on 
piling up more and more dots, but elsewhere in the Middle East, things 
are falling apart fast due mostly to the Trump administration's 
incompetence. It started with this nonsensical fracture of relations 
between Saudi Arabia and another key U.S. Gulf ally, Qatar. It was the 
kind of disruption that, frankly, would normally be papered over and 
fixed by a competent U.S. administration probably in days, but 3 years 
later, the two countries--Saudi Arabia and Qatar--still aren't talking, 
largely because we did nothing to fix it. Making matters worse, Saudi 
Arabia and their one remaining friend in the region, UAE, aren't 
getting along now either.
  Under Trump, the war in Yemen began to rage out of control. Tens of 
thousands of innocent Yemenis, many of them little children, died 
needlessly as Trump piled more weapons and more bombs into the war and 
did really nothing to try to find a peace agreement between the parties 
who for a year had been begging the United States to step in and play a 
traditional role as mediator. The conflict has raged on for so long due 
to Trump's unwillingness to use America's diplomatic muscle that events 
on the ground have become so chaotic that the Saudis and the Emiratis 
have now parted ways. Now, with the Qataris, the Saudis, and the 
Emiratis all on different wavelengths, the potential for proxy wars 
between these wealthy nations could get much worse all over the Middle 
East.
  In Iran, right next door, the campaign of blind escalation and 
provocation has been disastrous. Every one of the President's national 
security advisors told him to stay in the Iran nuclear agreement and 
focus his energies on addressing Iran's other malevolent behavior in 
the region, like their ballistic missile program or their support for 
terrorist organizations. Trump ignored all his advisors, like he has 
ignored all the rest of the counsel he has received on major foreign 
policy matters, and he canceled the agreement and implemented a series 
of unilateral sanctions against Iran. He coordinated with absolutely no 
one.
  Now, Iran, feeling cornered but also not feeling particularly 
vulnerable, given the fact that America couldn't recruit any of our 
friends to our new anti-Iran campaign, hit back against oil tankers, 
American drones, and Saudi pipelines. We now seem perpetually on the 
precipice of war with Iran. Meanwhile, they have restarted parts of 
their shuttered nuclear program. We haven't convinced a single nation 
to help us build new sanctions, and there is absolutely no chance that 
Trump is going to secure a better deal than the JCPOA before he leaves 
office in just over a year.
  Iran is a bigger menace than before he took office. They just scored 
another major victory with Trump's abandonment of the Kurds, and an 
anti-Iran coalition that the United States methodically built under 
Barack Obama has vanished, perhaps never again to be resurrected.
  In this very red region of the world right now, the only leader who 
has been happy with Trump's dangerous, bizarre, nonstrategy on Iran has 
been Benjamin Netanyahu, but he may not be in power much longer, and 
his alliance with Trump has left his successor a frightening legacy. 
Under Trump's watch, the two-state solution in Israel--a longtime 
bipartisan lynchpin of American policy in the Middle East--has 
effectively fallen apart.
  Trump has allowed Israel to take steps that make a future Palestinian 
state almost impossible. For 3 years, he has put his son-in-law--whose 
only experience was using his father's money to buy real estate--in 
charge of brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a 
joke. Everybody knew it, but since Trump was President, everybody had 
to play along. Now there is no peace plan. There was never going to be 
a peace plan, and the chances for one are almost nonexistent after 3 
years of the Trump administration.
  Down in Libya, Trump admittedly inherited a pretty miserable 
situation, but somehow, like everything else, he managed to make it 
worse. The country has been fractured for years, as

[[Page S5819]]

rival militias with a host of foreign patrons have been fighting a 
civil war that has created a vacuum that has been filled in by 
extremists and a migrant crisis that continues to expand. But instead 
of doing the hard work of diplomacy to try to get the warring parties 
back to the table, instead, Trump threw his support--his personal 
support--behind General Haftar, upending years of American diplomacy 
and endorsing Haftar's plan to try to take Tripoli by force. As a 
result, the fighting there continues, peace talks are failing, and the 
humanitarian crisis grows by the day.
  One of the consequences of this Trump death spiral in Libya and the 
Middle East is that the economic and political refugees continue to 
flow into Europe, which simply isn't politically ready to accept this 
rate of inflow, and by slashing the number of refugees allowed in the 
United States from over 100,000 to 18,000, we have communicated to the 
Europeans that we have no interest in helping. Just like everything 
else, Trump has made the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants into 
Europe even harder by serving as a model for racist, xenophobic 
demagogues, and rightwing nationalist political parties who want to 
bring Trump's form of political nativism into Europe.
  Nationalist political parties are on the rise all across the West, 
and Trump is absolutely central to their development. He gravitates not 
toward Angela Merkel, whose courageous leadership has held the EU 
together through all these crises, but he hews to Viktor Orban, who has 
stoked the embers of nationalism to take Hungary down a dark path. 
Trump and his nationalist compatriots weaponize these fears of 
immigration and cultural change to justify really bad policies--from 
labeling journalists as enemies of the state to putting kids in cages. 
And when rightwing groups try to copy Trump's success and deploy his 
playbook in countries all throughout Europe, he doesn't stand up and 
object, as the leader of the free world should; he offers a wink and a 
nod or sometimes a warm embrace.
  Trump doesn't stop there in his deliberate attempts to undermine 
European democracy. He has carried out a systematic, purposeful 
campaign to weaken the European Union and NATO. By now, we have all 
grown used to Trump's attacks on globalism, but it is still pretty 
extraordinary that we have a President who just doesn't attack the 
specific institutions he loathes, such as the U.N., the EU, or NATO; he 
levies regular broadsides against the entire concept of global 
cooperation. He sees multilateralism as a weakness, and his 
cheerleading of Britain out the door of the EU and his constant attacks 
on NATO, even to the point of wondering out loud if the United States 
would defend allies if attacked risks taking down the entire post-World 
War II order. That would be a disaster for us and a gift to countries 
like China, Russia, India, and nonstate actors such as al-Qaida and 
ISIS.
  When it comes to our relations with Europe, Trump reserves his 
greatest multilateral animus for global attempts to address climate 
change. The Paris Agreement wasn't even a binding commitment on the 
United States, but Trump felt so strongly that climate change was a 
Chinese-perpetrated hoax--unwind that riddle for me--that he pulled us 
out of the agreement in a big, grand, festive ceremony at the White 
House.
  Global climate catastrophe is coming if we don't do anything. In 
fact, it is already here. The story of Syria's descent into madness can 
partially be told through the tale of successive global warming-
connected droughts that forced farmers into overcrowded cities that 
weren't ready for those population surges. Trump's hostility to climate 
action is one of his most unforgiveable global legacies, and the next 
President may not have enough time or political capital to make up the 
ground we have lost on climate change, especially with European 
partners.
  Speaking of failure to capitalize on opportunities, let's spin the 
globe back to our own hemisphere, where, according to the script, 
things couldn't be going much worse. Here in the Americas everything 
that Trump has touched thus far has fallen apart, and the United States 
is weaker regionally than ever before.
  Trump's nativism is his political calling card, but his own policies 
seem to encourage more migration to the United States, not less of it. 
President Trump's decision to cut off foreign assistance to Central 
American countries because they weren't doing enough to stop migration 
is lunacy. President Obama's program of investing in Central American 
security so that less of their citizens felt the need to flee to 
America was beginning to work, and Trump gave it all away simply to 
provide fuel to his domestic political agenda.
  Further south, U.S.-Venezuela policy is one of the few times Trump's 
Presidency stood up to a dictator. Unfortunately, because Trump doesn't 
know how to do foreign policy, he botched that intervention too. It has 
been really embarrassing to watch this administration repeatedly and 
wrongly claim that the Maduro regime is on the verge of collapse. They 
did it in January, when Juan Guaido swore himself in as interim 
President. They did it again in February, when they said deploying 
American aid along the border would trigger the regime's fall, and they 
did it again in April in a lead-up to a military uprising that went 
nowhere. The White House has engaged in tough talk only to see Maduro's 
hold on power endure.
  Trump played all his cards on this crisis right in the first few 
days, like a nervous teenager. Now we are left sanctioning the 
Venezuelan people and recognizing a leader of the country who isn't 
really the leader of that country and probably isn't going to be the 
leader of that country. It is yet another failure that makes us look 
weak and foolish. We make a play and can't back it up. It is hard to be 
scared of the United States when everything we try to do goes wrong.
  Let's move back over to the African Continent for a moment. Now, as a 
candidate, Trump repeatedly stoked fears of the Ebola epidemic in West 
Africa, tweeting that the United States ``must immediately stop all 
flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start to 
spread inside our borders!'' Of course, this didn't make any sense, and 
it doesn't make any sense now. We have known for ages that travel bans 
aren't actually the best way to deal with an outbreak of disease, but 
since he has become President, the Trump administration has asked 
Congress to rescind $252 million that had been put aside to deal with 
the virus. He ousted the NSC's top biodefense expert and repeatedly 
sought to slash funding for global health programs. Sadly, Trump's 
default response to epidemics and barriers of exclusion, defunding 
preventive measures, and opting to feed panic rather than deploy an 
orderly response that is driven by science and led by scientists only 
hurts our ability to control outbreaks that are present today and in 
the future.
  Finally, Denmark. Trump managed to even screw up our relationship 
with Denmark, which many of us would have thought was impossible. Out 
of an episode of ``The Simpsons,'' Trump canceled a diplomatic meeting 
with Denmark's leader because they wouldn't agree to sell us Greenland. 
It sounds funny, but it is an example of the relatively small things 
compared to the big world screw-ups that happen every day that only get 
a few days of media attention.
  Denmark is one of our strongest NATO allies. At the height of the war 
in Afghanistan, they had one of the highest numbers of troops per 
capita fighting alongside us. They hold the key to blocking a Russian 
gas pipeline that could avoid Ukraine, damaging their economy, and come 
into Europe, but now we have managed to even make Denmark an adversary. 
I know it sounds implausible, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. 
It is a policy massacre everywhere. The world is on fire, and in most 
places Trump is one of the arsonists. Meanwhile, who is benefiting? 
Across the board, America's enemies and our competitors are rubbing 
their hands with delight as we score own goal after own goal. Putin, 
Xi, Erdogan, Kim, the hard-liners in Iran, could not have scripted a 
better opportunity to gain power for themselves at our expense.
  I say that Trump's foreign policy is a global joke, but calling what 
he does policy is probably unfair. He doesn't really care to take the 
time to learn about the world. He doesn't read his

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briefings. He makes it up day by day, with his personal political 
priorities, his jealousies, and his headline addiction guiding his 
decisions rather than anything connected to our actual national 
security interests. Our foreign policy is in complete, utter, total 
meltdown, and it is time for all of us to face facts.
  You can't impeach a President because you disagree with their 
policies, but this is beyond a policy disagreement. This is a President 
who has compromised our Nation's integrity and our credibility, who has 
put in jeopardy the safety of our citizens, especially as ISIS breaks 
out of detainment and looks to regroup to threaten America again in 
Syria.
  These kinds of things--the perversion of the powers of the 
Presidency--are not allowed in a democracy. Our refusal to accept this 
kind of behavior is what separates us from all the tin-pot 
dictatorships around the world.
  I hope, eventually, my Republican colleagues see this, but I also 
want my Republican colleagues who spend their time thinking of 
themselves as bulwarks of national security to see the damage, much of 
it irreparable, that Trump is doing to our position in the world. Why 
continue to offer him this unconditional protection from an impeachment 
inquiry if the cost of his staying in office is the shattering of our 
reputation around the world?
  Why continue to defend him if his actions everywhere are causing the 
world to fall apart--and it is falling apart in every part of the 
globe. Everything this administration has touched has gotten worse. The 
scariest part is that this President and this administration still have 
14 more months to do even more damage.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cotton). The Senator from Oklahoma.