Column cherry-picks Trump national security critics

OPINION:

Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin is one of the more tiresome Trump critics, writing several columns a week full of knee-jerk attacks on former President Donald Trump and shameless cheerleading for President Biden. Ms. Rubin’s columns are a bizarro world where the Trump administration had no accomplishments, no rational person can support Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden is a brilliant and successful president.

Her recent Post column “Take it from conservative national security experts: Trump is unfit” is a new low.

In this column, Ms. Rubin tries to piece together a narrative that Mr. Trump is a threat to global security by quoting two former Trump  administration officials — former national security adviser John Bolton and former White House chief of staff John Kelly — as well as Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and CIA director for President George H.W. Bush.

(Full disclosure: I served as chief of staff to Mr. Bolton when he was Mr. Trump’s national security adviser and when Mr. Bolton was undersecretary of state for arms control in the George W. Bush administration. I also worked with Gen. Kelly when I was the National Security Council’s chief of staff.)

Ms. Rubin’s column is dishonest because she knows these men do not represent most conservative national security experts, who are unifying behind Mr. Trump because they believe the world is much more unstable and dangerous because of Mr. Biden’s disastrous national security policies.

So, to make her case, Ms. Rubin cherry-picked three former Republican officials known for having a personal animus against Mr. Trump and deliberately ignored the views of the vast majority of conservative national security experts. Ms. Rubin rigged her column by stacking it with Trump critics.

Ironically, the day after Ms. Rubin’s column ran, former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that despite her differences with Mr. Trump, she plans to vote for him because a second Biden term “would be a catastrophe.” Ms. Haley’s decision must have stung Ms. Rubin, who all but endorsed Ms. Haley for the GOP presidential nomination. Unlike Messrs. Bolton, Kelly and Gates, however, Ms. Haley is putting her personal differences with Mr. Trump aside for the good of our country.

Ms. Rubin also ignored an important new book by the America First Policy Institute on the Trump administration’s approach to national security by 15 experts who endorsed Mr. Trump’s approach, including former national security adviser Keith Kellogg, Rep. Michael Waltz, former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, and other experts.

The book, “An America First Approach to U.S. National Security,” received a great deal of press, including an article by The Associated Press that Ms. Rubin must have read.

The authors of this book praise Mr. Trump’s foreign policy achievements such as the Abraham Accords, keeping our country out of new wars, defeating the Islamic State, lowering tensions with North Korea, standing up to Russia, China and Iran, promoting free and fair trade, and making the United States energy secure. They explain why the America First approach to national security works, why it is not isolationism, and how returning to this approach is the only way to repair the damage done to U.S. and global security by Mr. Biden’s foreign policy incompetence.

The book’s authors don’t pull their punches that there was room for improvement in the Trump administration’s foreign policy, mostly because of bad choices to fill top national security posts and a failure to get control of the national security bureaucracy. The book concludes with two insightful chapters on how to address these problems by implementing major reforms of the U.S. intelligence community and a comprehensive program to name the most qualified and capable officials to implement Mr. Trump’s national security agenda if he is reelected.

I view Ms. Rubin’s column as a sign of desperation by the mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment struggling to counter the growing perception that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy was highly successful and Mr. Biden’s has been an unmitigated disaster.

Ms. Rubin seems to think that by citing criticism of Mr. Trump from Mr. Bolton, Gen. Kelly and Mr. Gates, she can distract the American people from the long list of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy failures, including the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the surge in tensions from China, the increase in North Korean missile tests, the deterioration of stability in the Middle East, major advances in Iran’s nuclear program, and the 11 million aliens, including thousands of criminals and people on terrorist watchlists, who crossed into the United States illegally because Mr. Biden refuses to secure the southern border.

The American people are not stupid. They are not going to discount Mr. Biden’s sorry foreign policy record just because three people who dislike Mr. Trump told them to.

I’ll end with this note to Jennifer Rubin: I am the editor of the new book “An America First Approach to U.S. National Security.” If you want to write an honest and informative column on where conservative experts stand on Trump and U.S. national security, please give me a call.

• Fred Fleitz is vice chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security and editor of “An America First Approach to U.S. National Security,” available from Amazon. He previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, a CIA analyst and a House Intelligence Committee staff member.