WASHINGTON – America's adversaries are just loving this.
Leaders of governments dismissed by Washington as totalitarian dictatorships are relishing the opportunity to draw attention to racism and violence in the land of the world's sole superpower.
Indeed, they are taking particular glee in President Donald Trump's widely criticized response to a deadly white supremacist rally, using the moment to decry the hypocrisy of America's practice of scolding the world about democracy and human rights.
"Behind the white supremacists is the power that has taken over the White House and the venues where decisions are made by the North American imperialists," Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Monday.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knocked America next: "If U.S. has any power, they better manage their country, tackle WhiteSupremacy rather than meddle in nations' affairs. Charlottesville," he tweeted.
Then China. "U.S. is not a human rights paradise, nor the world's moral leader," a headline in China's state-run People's Daily said Thursday.
Saturday's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., left one woman dead, and Trump's insistence that people who showed up to protest racists deserve some of the blame for the violence has been widely condemned in the United States and abroad.
Iran, classified by Washington as a state sponsor of terror, balks at any Western effort to call out its government for frequent human rights violations.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal agreed to by the Obama administration, saying that he would negotiate a better agreement. But while he continues to denounce Tehran, the president has continued to certify Iranian compliance with the current deal.
In Venezuela, where Trump last week threatened a possible military strike in response to the country's democratic breakdown, Maduro used Trump's response to Charlottesville to further decry Yankee interventionism in Latin American affairs.
Maduro spoke at one of the "anti-imperialist" rallies his government organized Monday amid a monthslong wave of protests by the opposition against the president's tightening grip on power. The U.S. has responded by sanctioning a range of Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself.
In communist China, media outlets were calling out what they cast as America's absence of moral authority on equality. The state-run Global Times ran an editorial lamenting the "tragic time warp" in which U.S. race relations had landed.
"Hate and terror are on the rise in America, and such problems are expected to increase," the People's Daily said. "The U.S. government should focus more on making America 'great again,' and less on making other countries more like America."
