No. of Recommendations: 6
Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders used flattery and pomp to get into Trump’s good graces, Trump’s former national security adviser writes in a memoir.This has been obvious. Trump wants to join the authoritarian club. These are the people he admires and he is easily manipulated by them.
Trump talks tough, but he loves the world's despots.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/books/review/at...Recently on the campaign trail, Donald Trump has talked up his aggressive stance on China, positioning himself as a tough negotiator in a brutal trade war. But a new memoir by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, one of Trump’s national security advisers, throws that narrative, and many other stories that Trump tells about his time in office, into stark relief.
As McMaster writes in “At War With Ourselves,” the president could sometimes be kept on the straight and narrow with a clever dose of reverse psychology (Xi Jinping wants you to say this, Xi Jinping wants you to say that). But just as often, McMaster shows Trump to have been an unpredictable waffler who undermined himself to the advantage of his competitors on the world stage.Here are a couple of the many anecdotes:
In November 2017, President Trump visited China on the third leg of a 13-day trip around Asia. It was his “most consequential” destination, McMaster explains. As they flew to Beijing, he warned Trump that Xi would try to trick him into saying something that was good for China, but bad for the United States and its allies. “The C.C.P.’s favorite phrase, ‘win-win,’” he recalls telling his boss at one point, “actually meant that China won twice.”
Trump seemed to hear him, but in the Great Hall of the People, the president strayed from his talking points. He agreed with Xi that military exercises in South Korea were “provocative” and a “waste of money” and suggested that China might have a legitimate claim to Japan’s Senkaku Islands. McMaster, his stomach sinking, passed a note to Gen. John Kelly, the chief of staff: Xi “ate our lunch,” it read.
Flattery and pomp from leaders like Xi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin seem to have been all that was required to get in Trump’s good graces. In 2018, McMaster found Trump in the Oval Office scrawling a cheerful note to Putin across a New York Post article reporting that the Russian president had denigrated the American political system but called Trump a good listener. Like a child with his Christmas wish list, the leader of the free world asked McMaster to send it to the Kremlin. It was especially bad timing: Evidence was coming to light that Putin had directed an assassination on British soil. McMaster did not forward the note, later explaining to an infuriated Trump that his letter would “reinforce the narrative that you are somehow in the Kremlin’s pocket.”More at the link I shared above.
No. of Recommendations: 4
Surprise!
The Trump cult has already swung into action with their 1 star reviews of McMaster's book. Even though there is no evidence in their 'reviews' that they've read the book.
Nice for Trump that he has a zombie cult to give him unconditional love no matter his multitudinous failings.
No. of Recommendations: 1
“At War With Ourselves” is beautifully written and never dull. Its author is as concerned with the commander in chief as he is with the destructive bickering among the president’s deputies who hurled “accusations of disloyalty” in their efforts to reach Trump’s ear. In tale after tale, McMaster shows how the former president allowed his own prejudices and the petty rivalries within his administration to undermine his policy goals in what McMaster terms a “vortex of vitriol.” Trump’s “indiscipline,” he writes, “made him the antagonist in his own story.”
No. of Recommendations: 3
Frontline did a good piece on Putin a while back. Putin played both Bush Jr (with the "grandmother's crucifix"), and Trump. He didn't know how to handle Obama (in large part because he was black, and he couldn't understand how we would elect a black man). Plus the VP (Biden) and Putin actively disliked each other (Biden was on the Senate Foreign Relations committee). Biden becoming POTUS was not in his plans. Biden was an old cold warrior, like Putin.
Putin's worst nightmare is a POTUS/Congress that will continue support for Ukraine. That means his armed forces will be mired in Ukraine for at least another 4 years, when he was expecting a victory in less than 4 months (back in 2022). Harris will have decent advisers, and keep Putin busy for years. Putin already has pushed two new members into NATO, his navy has suffered several significant losses, his army has suffered grievous casualties, his stockpiles are dwindling (e.g. they've pulled T62 tanks out of mothballs because he can't make enough new tanks...those are Vietnam era), etc.
Vlad has dreams of reestablishing the USSR, and the convict would help him greatly in that task, due to his easy manipulation. Vlad's own actions have been disastrous for those plans. If the US continues support for Ukraine, along with European support, Putin will be tied up for a decade or more. He won't have the resources to meddle elsewhere, nor the economy to support it, while strengthening alliances against him.
