Jeff Flake Slams Trump’s South Africa Tweet on Senate Floor: Don’t ‘Conduct Foreign Policy by Tweet’
Senator Jeff Flake (R- AZ) took to the Senate floor today to denounce President Donald Trump‘s tweet last night about South Africa.
After watching Tucker Carlson, the President tweeted out what was widely denounced as the echo of a white nationalist talking point:
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
Flake read Trump’s tweet on the Senate floor and then said POTUS should “be more careful” if he’s going to conduct foreign policy on Twitter and not “base something on one news report.”
“These things matter,’ Flake said, saying that what he’s talking about is right now “simply a proposal, it has not been implemented.”
He continued:
“There is no evidence to suggest that there is a large-scale killing of farmers. Of course, the death of one farmer is too many, but to suggest that there’s somehow a large-scale killing going on when the evidence suggests that the number of farmers that have been killed over the past year is about a third of the level that was reached in the 1990s. So I would just encourage the President to be more careful when he tweets, to not conduct foreign policy by tweet.”
There's a danger in conducting foreign policy by tweet after viewing a single press report. First, land reforms have been proposed in parliament in South Africa, but not yet adopted. Second, there is no "large scale killing of farmers" going on in South Africa. https://t.co/lpdyNIEH7V
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) August 23, 2018
You can watch the video above, via C-SPAN 2.
[image via screengrab]
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