All that stuff about democracy and fairness and diversity

“All the questions I got were fundamentally the same. People around the world asking, ‘All that stuff you’ve been telling us for so long — about democracy and human rights and fairness and diversity — it’s not really true, is it?’ American public diplomacy is ultimately about values. And now people around the world were saying that this story was a fiction. It’s not as though people around the world had never said that before. We’d been called hypocrites long before Donald Trump decided to run for president. But we’d never had someone running for president who so explicitly rejected those values both in his ideology and in his behavior. That was something new.”

The view from 2016, from Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 326