Friday, June 19, 2020

President of Poland under attack for his upcoming visit


Next Wednesday, June 24th, President of Poland will visit Washington to meet President Trump, where the issue of moving American troops from Germany to Poland is expected to be discussed, among others issues such as trade, energy and telecommunications security. 

The announced visit drew an ire of left-leaning American media, which are upset that leader of mostly Catholic country dares to visit the United States during their "Pride Month". To add an insult to the injury he is a politician who made a fight with "LGBT+ ideology" a central issue of his reelection campaign. 

As Business Insider writes, "President Donald Trump's first foreign visitor since the coronavirus pandemic began will be Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has pushed his country in an increasingly authoritarian direction." To support that opinion they cite an article by the Washington Post's editorial board, that failed to disclose that one of the editors is married to the former presidential candidate, written in 2018. 

The MSNBC is even worried that "the White House is trying to influence Poland's elections." So they invoked Barack Obama, who said that "we have a practice of not meeting with leaders right before their elections," when in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited by GOP leaders to address a joint session of Congress. Barack Obama didn't like Netanyahu very much.

It is needless to say that the Democrats don't want the Polish leader, who is Trump's supporter, to visit the United States. Representative Eliot L. Engel, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote yesterday: “Such a visit in the middle of a global pandemic—just eleven days before Poland’s presidential election, in which President Duda is a candidate—is highly inappropriate. I call on President Trump to cancel this meeting immediately.”