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Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum blasted President Donald Trump and his administration on Sunday for choosing Saudi Arabia as the destination for Trump’s first international trip as president.

Citing the oil-rich nation’s extensive record of human rights abuses, its all-powerful royal family’s grip on the nation’s finances and its abuse of women — who are forced to cover their faces, not allowed to drive and who must ask a male relative for permission to travel — Applebaum took Trump and his advisers to task on a number of points.

“(H)ere is a list, for the record,” she said, “of just a few of the ways in which President Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia was bizarre, unseemly, unethical and un-American.”

Saudi Arabia was a rotten first choice, she said, of all the nations in the world the new president could visit.

“The past four American presidents, two Republicans and two Democrats, made their first trips to either Mexico and Canada, countries that are close trading partners, close allies, compatible democracies and of course neighbors,” she said. “Trump chose, instead, to make his first presidential visit to an oligarchic kleptocracy which forces women to hide their faces and forbids them to travel without a male guardian’s permission.”


More: http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/trumps-saudi-arabia-visit-was-bizarre-unseemly-unethical-and-un-american-wapo-columnist/



President Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia (Screen capture)