Donald Trump would be “totally useless and dangerous” if he was elected again as US president, according to former Defence and Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind.
In an interview with Camilla Tominey on GB News, he also said he hoped Joe Biden would win the US presidential election and that China’s president had made “stupid” strategic mistakes.
When asked about Donald Trump’s bid for president, he said: “Here you have a unique situation of a president when he was in office - and it's not so much this charge, it’s a question, for example, did he incite people to try and break the law to declare that the election had been invalid?
“Was he involved in the riots and the capital? Now, these will be even more serious.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind says Donald Trump would be 'totally useless and dangerous'
GB News
“And the very fact that he's having to face these kinds of accusations, in my judgement if you're asking me, should prove to anyone who had any doubts how totally useless and dangerous he would be, if he was again to become president of the United States.
“Not just for the Americans, but for the world as a whole.”
He added: “If it's Biden versus Trump, I hope to God it is Biden who wins, but you never know.
“Will he be able to complete his term, not just will he be alive? I mean, maybe he just would become so ill because of some other problem that he'd have to hand over.
“So the choice of vice president then becomes crucially important. Kamala Harris, the current vice president, is not seen as a very strong holder of that office.
“But will it be possible to have a new candidate and if so, what might that be?”
Asked by Camilla about Russia and China, Rifkind said: “One of the foolish things [president] Xi Jinping has done is in many ways very impressive but his strategic judgement is useless, because his main target as we all know is Taiwan.
“He would admit that and yet what he has over the last three or four years is forget America, forget Europe, forget even Australia.
“He's alienated every one of his Asian neighbours, Japan, India, Vietnam, the countries of south-east Asia by having territorial claims on them as well and by taking them forward.”
He added: “So here you have someone who has managed to unite all the Asian neighbours so that Vietnam - think of the history of Vietnam in America - Vietnam, the Vietnamese Minister recently said, ‘today America is our partner…
“India has just joined what's called The Quad, with the United States, Japan and Australia to discuss how to contain China.
“Now these things would not have happened but for the foolish judgments made by Xi Jinping, who's a bit like Putin in that sense, he has got so much power, he doesn't listen to anybody else.
“And just as he mucked up China's handling of Covid, he’s mucked up their foreign policy as well. That's serious stuff.”
Sir Malcolm Rifkind said he hoped Joe Biden would win the US presidential election over Donald Trump
Reuters
Rifkind continued: “The Chinese are much smarter than the Russians because when it comes to it, when the United Nations votes to condemn Russian invasion of Ukraine, China doesn't vote for that motion…
“If you have…a non-nuclear weapons state being threatened by a nuclear state, then guess what will happen on China's border.
“Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, will say ‘well, if you need nuclear weapons to defend yourself from your big neighbour, maybe we should start’.”
On Russia perhaps becoming a client state of China, he said: “The Russians have to be very, very careful. because as a result, for example, again of Putin's stupidity, the biggest market for their gas was Germany and Europe.
“That's long gone, 100% of it will be gone literally weeks from now, it will never come back.
“Now when you're dealing with gas. It's not like oil, you can sell it, put it on a ship, you can take it anywhere and sell it at a discount.
“Gas needs pipelines. There aren't any pipelines at the moment and won't be for ten years.”