Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He blogs at coreyrobin.com.

Rather than dismiss Trump’s claims in his New York Times interview as “unreasonable,” we should take seriously two of them — less for what they say about him than what they reveal about his critics.

Since the Cold War, U.S. elites have been indifferent to how police brutality plays abroad. And who would die to defend Baltic states? The poor, and minorities.

First, when asked whether he’d pressure Turkey over human rights, Trump said, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.” Citing Ferguson and Baltimore, the protests and riots that ensued, and the killing of police, Trump rejected George W. Bush’s foreign policy of democracy promotion: “I don’t know that we have a right to lecture.”

During the Cold War, civil rights activists pointed to the disparity between what the United States said abroad — freedom — and what it practiced at home: racist tyranny. Trump has no sympathy for Black Lives Matter, but he’s right that other countries don’t take the U.S. seriously when it lectures them about human rights, as the two reporters who interviewed Trump obliquely acknowledge.

The liberal silence around Trump’s claim points to a bigger problem: the indifference of U.S. elites, now that the threat of communism is gone, to how police brutality plays on the international stage.

Last year, delegates from 117 countries at the United Nations slammed the United States over its treatment of African-Americans. It was the kind of embarrassment that once would have terrified the United States, which is why Malcolm X threatened it. This time, it barely made a ripple. Instead, the White House is now reviewing (and may overturn) a ban that prohibits the federal government from providing military equipment to police departments.

Trump’s comment — and its reception on the left — inadvertently reveals the challenges movements like Black Lives Matter face, across the political aisle, now that the Cold War is over.

Second, Trump hinted that he’s not sure the United States should back any Baltic state — all of them, NATO allies — if it were invaded by Russia, unless those states start paying more for their defense. Probably no statement provoked more outrage among Democrats and in the liberal media.

Some of these Democrats and liberals claim that leftists who are insufficiently enthusiastic about Clinton must be indifferent to poor people and people of color, whose lives would be threatened by a Trump presidency. Yet who would fight and die in a war over the Baltics if not people of color and the poor, from whose ranks our “all-volunteer” military disproportionately draws its recruits?

During the Bush years, we had a name for laptop bombardiers willing to fight America’s wars with other people’s blood. But liberals today don’t talk about that. When a high-level official in the Obama administration says, “We are ready to give our lives” in defense of Latvia, liberals don’t ask, “What do you mean ‘we’?”

So Trump poses a version of the question. Not because he cares about the poor or people of color — his focus is on who pays the bills — but because he knows how to rattle cages, without setting anyone free.



Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

