Lesley Stahl: What are you options? Let's say they did. What are your options? Would you consider imposing sanctions, as a bipartisan group of senators have proposed?
President Donald Trump: Well, it depends on what the sanction is. I'll give ya an example. They are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it.
Lesley Stahl: So would you cut that off--
President Donald Trump: I tell you what I don't wanna do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, all these com-- I don't wanna hurt jobs. I don't wanna lose an order like that. There are other ways of-- punishing, to use a word that's a pretty harsh word, but it's true.
Lesley Stahl: Tell everybody what's at stake here. You know---
President Donald Trump: Well, there's a lot at stake. There's a lot at stake. And maybe especially so because this man was a reporter. There's something-- you'll be surprised to hear me say that. There's something really terrible and disgusting about that, if that were the case. So we're gonna have to see. We're going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment.
Most past Presidents would have been far more opaque, something along the lines of 'We recognize the importance of our partnership with Saudi Arabia going forward...', and not be as crass as to actually spell out the calculus going on: the value journalistic freedom versus American defense contractor jobs.
Donald Trump is not the first President to consider the American Gross National Product versus the American commitment to journalistic freedom. But Trump's political philosophy is based in the transactional now. How much outrage is appropriate for one man, "maybe especially" a reporter, in the face of over $100 billion dollars in arms sales?
I guess the whole 'shining city on a hill' Reagan era GOP rhetoric is now gone?