Former national security adviser Susan Rice on Wednesday night slammed President Donald Trump for withdrawing support for the Kurds in northern Syria and essentially allowing Turkey to attack America’s battlefield allies.
“As somebody wrote in a very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy for example,” Trump said earlier in the day of the Kurds, who fought alongside American troops against the so-called Islamic State. “They’re there to help us with their land, and that’s a different thing.”
Rice, who served under former President Barack Obama, responded with a blistering question on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.”
“What is he smoking?” she asked host Cooper.
“I mean, the Kurds were the pointy end of the spear who fought ISIS on our behalf. They bled and died because they believed in the partnership they had established with the United States and we just threw them under the bus in 24 hours. It’s appalling, it’s disgraceful,” Rice said.
“And then today, when the Turks quite predictably are bombing the bejeezus out of Syria and Trump allegedly orders the U.S. military not to come to their defense, not to protect them. We’ve crossed a Rubicon here of the trail that I think is going to haunt us for decades to come,” she continued. “We are handing over our Kurdish allies to slaughter, and that blood is going to be on Donald Trump’s hands.”
Rice earlier accused Trump of making U.S. foreign policy all about himself.
“It’s appalling. It is so much worse than I imagined. Every day a lie, a disparagement and a trashing of the institutions and the norms that we all believe have held us together,” she said. “And what is so extraordinary is it’s all about him. We talk about foreign policy, and he said his doctrine is America first, but I think we’re seeing it is really me first. And that’s how he is governing. Everything is about him.”
Check out the full interview here: