There are undoubtedly parts of any Donald Trump presidency that are unique to him, but there are also parts that are continuous with other presidents, and one problem the media has is that they freak out over both. New York Times columnist David Brooks did precisely that on Friday’s PBS News Hour as he gave a factually-challenged retort to Trump’s speech in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where he expressed his Middle East policy would be guided by pragmatism and not high-minded idealism or moral lecturing.
Brooks lamented, “That was a speech in which he defined his foreign policy. And he basically — all of American history, at least since postwar, is like, we care about democracy. We don't like it if you're throwing people off roofs. Like, we don't like it if you're murdering journalists. Like, we don't like that stuff. And that was partly realpolitik, the idea that tyrants are more likely to be expansionist and destabilizing, but also who we are as Americans. Like, we do have a moral foreign policy.”
He continued, “And the two key pieces of the Trump speech were, we're not going to tell you how you run your country. You want to blow off some journalists you don't like, that's your business. And the second was we're not in the nation-building business anymore. We're just staying out. And that's a pretty sharp reversal of what had been 100 years of bipartisan foreign policy.”
Fact-check: it was not. Every American president since FDR has had a pragmatic relationship with the Saudis. Dwight Eisenhower viewed the Saudis as a useful counter to the more radical Arab countries like Nasser’s Egypt, while George H.W. Bush deployed several hundred thousand troops there to liberate Kuwait. Even Joe Biden, who ran for office promising to make the Saudis a “pariah,” reversed course and eventually dangled the idea of normalized Saudi-Israeli relations in front of the latter to try to incentivize it to end the Gaza War.
For better or for worse, Trump’s Qatar visit is also a continuation of bipartisan policy. Trump spoke to U.S. troops at an air base that opened during the George W. Bush presidency and that our British allies have also used since 2017. Biden granted Qatar non-NATO major ally status in 2022 and partnered with Doha in its Israel-Hamas ceasefire efforts.
So, Brooks is clearly wrong on basic history, meaning his warnings of Trump’s foreign policy changing America’s internal sense of self were a bit overdramatic, “And we will see if it's right, whether we should be tolerant of dictators. And we will see whether Americans can stomach it, because we define our national identity by how we see ourselves acting abroad. And if we become amoralists, then that will shift how Americans think of their own country.”
American foreign policy since the days of George Washington has been a mix of idealism and pragmatism because sometimes there are good guys and bad guys, and other times the world is more complicated. Contrary to what Brooks claimed, Trump’s Middle East visit was just a continuation of that theme.
Here is a transcript of the May 16 show:
PBS NewsHour
5/16/2025
7:37 PM ET
DAVID BROOKS: And that was a speech in which he defined his foreign policy. And he basically — all of American history, at least since postwar, is like, we care about democracy. We don't like it if you're throwing people off roofs. Like, we don't like it if you're murdering journalists. Like, we don't like that stuff.
And that was partly realpolitik, the idea that tyrants are more likely to be expansionist and destabilizing, but also who we are as Americans. Like, we do have a moral foreign policy.
And the two key pieces of the Trump speech were, we're not going to tell you how you run your country. You want to blow off some journalists you don't like, that's your business. And the second was we're not in the nation-building business anymore. We're just staying out. And that's a pretty sharp reversal of what had been 100 years of bipartisan foreign policy.
And we will see if it's right, whether we should be tolerant of dictators. And we will see whether Americans can stomach it, because we define our national identity by how we see ourselves acting abroad. And if we become amoralists, then that will shift how Americans think of their own country.
