CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Sounds the Alarm on One of Trump’s ‘Most Damaging Legacies’ For the U.S.

CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria joined PBS’s Firing Line with Margaret Hoover this week to discuss the 2024 presidential election and sounded the alarm on what he sees as former President Donald Trump’s “most damaging legacies.”

“We’ve just watched Republicans stall Ukraine aid for several months. If Donald Trump returns to the presidency, how do you think the current faction of Republican isolationism ends up expressing itself in our national foreign policy?” Hoover asked Zakaria.

“I’m very worried about it,” replied the veteran journalist and commentatory, adding:

I was, accurately describing where the Republican Party was in 1999. I think we have a new Republican Party today. And I think that this has been one of the, to my mind, most damaging legacies of what Donald Trump has done. He has returned the Republican Party back to its isolationism. What people often forget is the Republican Party was was deeply isolationist.

And in the 1930s, people like Buckley and and, Reagan and Nixon transformed the Republican Party and made it an internationalist party. But what Trump has done is, is taking it back to its isolationist roots. And I worry a great deal about this, because until now, America’s international engagement was not a partisan issue. The particular policies might have been, but the idea of America being deeply engaged with the world was something both parties agreed on.

And if we end up having the kind of debate we just had over Ukraine, where every time the United States is thinking about making commitments, helping people abroad, opposing, you know, disruptive dictatorships, every time you end up with a partisan divide, it’s a terrible place for us to be in, terrible place for the world to be.

Watch the clip above via PBS.