1103 Comments
⭠ Return to thread

Trump will never be the wealthiest man in the world, as he has demonstrated over and over again. He will always find a way to fu*k things up, with his myopic focus on immediate personal gain. He thinks he can control Putin, but he is too dumb to realize that Putin can only succeed when the U.S. and its NATO allies work in lock step to hold him at bay. Absent that guardrail, he is likely to find himself falling out of a window some day.

Expand full comment

Maureen, in a conversation Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Prof. Brook Harrington were having yesterday on Ben-Ghiat's weekly Zoom meeting, they discussed that Trump is working on a laundry list of actions that he has promised people like the Broligarchs and Putin, only Putin comes first because he has a habit of killing people who cross him. What does Putin want? Putin, who is broken up about the break up of the Soviet Union in 1990, wants to have the US be broken up too, or diminished. Trump is doing this from within.

Putin also wants the EU to split up, and it began with Brexit, so that with the US and EU ineffective he can go on with his goal to expand Russia to include former Soviet countries, which would have him marching on the Balkans after taking Ukraine. Trump's miniscule tariffs on Russia, after Russia already has so many tariffs from the US that there is almost nothing left to put tariffs on is showmanship not any real threat to Putin.

For himself, Trump just wants to make money. He is well positioned to do this. He gets profits out of all the people he grifts from, even if they lose money. For those people they are buying access, so whatever he is selling is just a front. Who loses big time is us.

But, I agree he could be falling out of a window some day, or something else. Do we know that the Secret Service has no FSB in it? How many FSB members applied to the Heritage Foundation in their big job search. I saw the leaked files and the loyalty questions. Anyone could lie and if you have a fake background created for you, with no real intelligence agency now to do a background check, how many people will be slipping in?

Expand full comment

Self sabotage is a symptom of malignant narcissism. Their ego actually knows they are evil so it causes them to make missteps that expose the error. It’s the only good thing about this type of sociopathy.

Expand full comment