Friedman: You recognize, what issues me about Trump, Patrick, is that he’s obtained an actual upside. The upside is that he’s able to shake up the sport board. And the sport board generally actually does should be shaken up. Why are we nonetheless speaking concerning the Israeli-Palestinian battle? Why are there nonetheless Palestinian refugees 75 years after the start of Israel? Why is that this Ukraine conflict simply dragging on as a conflict of attrition?
So I believe there’s one thing really fairly wholesome about going again to fundamentals and asking these questions. However Trump, on the identical time, is a chump. And what’s troubling is his mixture of being able to ask actually radical questions after which, in terms of the solutions, simply shopping for every little thing Putin says.
Healy: Shopping for all of it, Tom, precisely. And Bibi Netanyahu and Putin — all of it. That’s the factor, that after I mentioned “thick as thieves,” I don’t perceive how Trump sees these guys who’re clearly appearing in their very own pursuits, not in America’s pursuits.
And it makes me marvel, for a President of the USA, does he take into consideration America’s pursuits or is it simply Donald Trump’s pursuits, no matter these are within the second? So, I need to run my concept by you and have you ever slice and cube it.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bibi Netanyahu: I believe Trump appears at these figures as people who find themselves the strongmen of the world. After which there are all these weak societies and weak folks. He appears at one thing like Europe and he sees it as a group of failed economies and open borders and weak nationwide identities. And he mainly sees the world as up for grabs, as out there to be carved up by the robust folks, and I discover myself questioning, in two years, if we’ll have a state of affairs the place the U.S. takes Greenland, Putin has carried out what he’s needed in Ukraine, Netanyahu has a free hand in Gaza, within the Center East, Xi does what he desires in Taiwan.
