Why is that stupid? Europeans are dependent on him now. European leaders will demurely congratulate Trump and him on their victory and hope they won’t be hit too hard by what comes next.
To call a bunch of countries that rank much higher than the States on quality of life “backwoods” is a pretty wild statement. The U.S. is the proudly unwiped asshole of the developed world.
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Facts don’t matter to Trump or Vance. Don’t expect anything in that department. They care about getting ahead or looking like they are.
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In my reading, Vance didn’t call European countries “backwoods”:
“I’m not going to go to some backwoods country and tell them how to live their lives, […] But European countries should theoretically share American values, especially about some very basic things like free speech.”
My paraphrasing of that would be: “There are ‘backwoods’ countries and I expect nothing of them. But European countries must share our values and need to leave our propaganda platform untouched.”
My reading is:
There are ‘backwoods’ countries and I am not going to be telling them explicitly how to live their lives, they should by default share our values and be doing what we do.
With this reading he is using backwood countries as european countries. With the American Republican party, you can safely assume the most offensive interpretation of their sentences because history shows us that they usually mean it.
