I would be cautious before casually assuming that when Trump says he’s “dealing with Afghanistan” or otherwise doing president-y things as a private citizen, he’s being delusional, or crazy, or bullshitty.
We have precedent for presidential candidates engaging in pre-election foreign policy subversion of the…
I would be cautious before casually assuming that when Trump says he’s “dealing with Afghanistan” or otherwise doing president-y things as a private citizen, he’s being delusional, or crazy, or bullshitty.
We have precedent for presidential candidates engaging in pre-election foreign policy subversion of the incumbent in the past. Nixon, and even Reagan, come to mind.
Trump, as a former president and the head of a large international business (albeit a failing one, which makes him all the more dangerous), almost certainly has backchannel communications to the very top of the Saudi and Israeli governments. He is likely to be at least attempting the same (as best he can) with others, up to and including Russia and China themselves.
This is not spoken aloud on respectable outlets, but it needs to be. We’ve had more than enough past and prologue dealing with this criminal not to presume these things are going on.
From Trump’s own perspective, he would be “weak” and a fool not to try such things—and countries that stand to reap a windfall from a revolution in foreign policy from the world’s superpower would feel themselves weak and foolish not to abet it.
Arguably, they’ve reaped a windfall already from such things. The world has lost a fair amount of faith in American reliability due to Trump’s post-election-defeat actions alone; they’re already anticipating and hedging against chaos in America following a Trump win; they’ve seen us let our ally in Ukraine nearly fall, for the sake of a few phone calls from an indicted criminal who’s not even president anymore. And who, by the way, probably still is hiding classified documents he stole.
It’s not implausible to think Trump, for all his addled, delusional narcissism, really is conducting some “shadow president” treasonous crap from Mar-a-Lago, while we sit here and scoff at the crazy old man “play-pretending”. Yet another thing about 2024 Trump we should take, though not literally, quite seriously.
Not to sound all paranoid, but:
I would be cautious before casually assuming that when Trump says he’s “dealing with Afghanistan” or otherwise doing president-y things as a private citizen, he’s being delusional, or crazy, or bullshitty.
We have precedent for presidential candidates engaging in pre-election foreign policy subversion of the incumbent in the past. Nixon, and even Reagan, come to mind.
Trump, as a former president and the head of a large international business (albeit a failing one, which makes him all the more dangerous), almost certainly has backchannel communications to the very top of the Saudi and Israeli governments. He is likely to be at least attempting the same (as best he can) with others, up to and including Russia and China themselves.
This is not spoken aloud on respectable outlets, but it needs to be. We’ve had more than enough past and prologue dealing with this criminal not to presume these things are going on.
From Trump’s own perspective, he would be “weak” and a fool not to try such things—and countries that stand to reap a windfall from a revolution in foreign policy from the world’s superpower would feel themselves weak and foolish not to abet it.
Arguably, they’ve reaped a windfall already from such things. The world has lost a fair amount of faith in American reliability due to Trump’s post-election-defeat actions alone; they’re already anticipating and hedging against chaos in America following a Trump win; they’ve seen us let our ally in Ukraine nearly fall, for the sake of a few phone calls from an indicted criminal who’s not even president anymore. And who, by the way, probably still is hiding classified documents he stole.
It’s not implausible to think Trump, for all his addled, delusional narcissism, really is conducting some “shadow president” treasonous crap from Mar-a-Lago, while we sit here and scoff at the crazy old man “play-pretending”. Yet another thing about 2024 Trump we should take, though not literally, quite seriously.