Dan Rather issued the following statement on his Facebook page today:
Someone needs to tell the President-elect that this isn’t some “reality-show” that you can fix in the editing room.
“I have said before that there are no training wheels to becoming president, and we may have seen the effects of that today.”
Reports are ricocheting across the news media and the diplomatic world that Donald Trump has become the first United States President or President-elect to speak directly with the leader of Taiwan in decades.
There is no bigger touchstone to the stability of the far rim of the Pacific than the issue of Taiwan. We do not yet know what precipitated this apparent gross breach of established American protocol, but the damage may already have been done. This is deeply serious business. You can expect that the government in Beijing is burning up the trans-Pacific communications with some version of “what the hell is going on?” They will likely make their displeasure, if not fury, known very quickly.
There’s is nothing would concern the Mainland Chinese more than to have a suspicion that American foreign policy will change. We can guess that this was something Trump and his advisors didn’t think through. Or maybe it was meant to be provocative. Regardless, someone needs to tell the President-elect that this isn’t some “reality-show” that you can fix in the editing room.”
