Jeff Flake: “there are no more consequential words spoken than those spoken by the President of the United States. The words of a…”

“there are no more consequential words spoken than those spoken by the President of the United States. The words of a President reverberate around the world like no other world leader's, and as attentive as Americans are to what our President says, the rest of the world is probably paying even closer attention, as it is often their fate that hangs in the balance when our President speaks. Americans can ignore certain utterances from the President. The rest of the world often has no such luxury. Another audience for Presidential utterances is the despot, the strongman, the authoritarian, and the dictator. From this President, that horrible focus group has received a great deal of sustenance. In fact, the oppressors of the world have taken to parroting some of their favorite lines from the White House. Anything critical of their regimes has become ``fake news,'' and the press is the ``enemy of the people,'' just to name two of our President's greatest hits. As I mentioned in this Chamber in January of this year, a State official in Myanmar recently said: There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news. He was, of course, referring to the persecuted ethnic group. In February of last year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad brushed off an Amnesty International report that some 13,000 people had been murdered in his military prisons by saying: You can forge anything these days. We are living in a fake news era.…”