QOTD -- Weak

 

"...Putin has no reason to prefer Trump's vision of a beautiful future to his own: a Ukraine with a puppet government, a population cowed by violence, patriots buried in mass graves, and resources in Russian hands.

"Like Trump’s fantasizing, his bullying also does not work abroad. To be sure, many Americans are afraid of Trump. He has purged his own political party, with threats of violence helping to keep Republican members of Congress in line. He is deploying the U.S. military as a police force, first in California and now in Washington, D.C.

But foreign enemies apprehend these intimidation tactics differently. The very moves that shock Americans delight America's foes. In Moscow, deployments of soldiers inside the United States look like weakness.

"Tough talk may resonate in America, where we confuse words with action. But for Russian leaders, it covers a weak foreign policy. Trump has made extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all. Russia has repaid him by continuing the war in Ukraine and mocking him on state-controlled television..." -- historian Timothy Snyder, writing in the Kyiv Independent on "Trump's Alaska Folly."  Snyder points out that all the signs, notwithstanding his meeting with President Zelenskyy and the other European adults, all point to the Malignant Fascist continuing to do election meddler and war criminal Putin's bidding.  His weak, rudderless foreign policy (it's a heavy lift to call it "policy") is further undercut by his abuses domestically, which make Putin and other American adversaries vibrate with pleasure as they see a chaotic Malignant Fascist- led poisoning of the American political bloodstream and the government turned against its own people.