President Donald Trump’s controversial tweets on North Korea’s leader and State Department efforts to end the buildup of the rogue nation’s nuclear arsenal have “kneecapped” diplomacy, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said Sunday.
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — a vocal critic of Trump’s social media digs at North Korea leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s strategy — said a military conflict is the last thing the United States wants to see.
“When our secretary of state is sitting down with a partner that matters most, China, trying to negotiate something that would resolve and keep us from going into military conflict with North Korea, which brings in South Korea, Japan, Russia — and kneecapped by the president — it hurts our nation,” he said.
"It hurts our efforts. It leads us more fully towards the conflict that most of us would like to see resolved in another way. The tweets that are sent out mocking a leader of another country, raises tensions in the region."
Corker also weighed in on the GOP tax reform plan, saying nothing in the current tax code should be untouchable.
“When groups start rallying against things and they succeed, everything starts unraveling,” he said. “We've got tough decisions to make, let's leave everything, the whole cafeteria of the code out there, so that let the tax writers do their job.”
“If you start taking things off the table on the front end we're not going to get where we need to go,” he said.
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