Friedman: You know, what concerns me about Trump, Patrick, is that he’s got a real upside. The upside is that he is ready to shake up the game board. And the game board sometimes really does need to be shaken up. Why are we still talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why are there still Palestinian refugees 75 years after the birth of Israel? Why is this Ukraine war just dragging on as a war of attrition?
So I think there’s something actually quite healthy about going back to basics and asking those questions. But Trump, at the same time, is a chump. And what’s troubling is his combination of being ready to ask really radical questions and then, when it comes to the answers, just buying everything Putin says.
Healy: Buying it all, Tom, exactly. And Bibi Netanyahu and Putin — all of it. That’s the thing, that when I said “thick as thieves,” I don’t understand how Trump sees these guys who are clearly acting in their own interests, not in America’s interests.
And it makes me wonder, for a President of the United States, does he think about America’s interests or is it just Donald Trump’s interests, whatever those are in the moment? So, I want to run my theory by you and have you slice and dice it.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bibi Netanyahu: I think Trump looks at these figures as people who are the strongmen of the world. And then there are all these weak societies and weak people. He looks at something like Europe and he sees it as a collection of failed economies and open borders and weak national identities. And he basically sees the world as up for grabs, as available to be carved up by the strong people, and I find myself wondering, in two years, if we’ll have a situation where the U.S. takes Greenland, Putin has done what he’s wanted in Ukraine, Netanyahu has a free hand in Gaza, in the Middle East, Xi does what he wants in Taiwan.
