Thread by @SteveSchmidtSES

This is a world view I have never understood.👇 Trump is the most predictable person in the world. He is as predictable as the Sun setting in the west and rising in the east. There is no mystery around Trump. How could there be? The idea that Vladimir Putin was kept guessing

https://twitter.com/RichLowry/status/1495961788722163714

2/ by Trump is lunacy. What Putin saw was strategic incoherence shaped by a vast ignorance of the world. He saw a whore in Trump who would sell out his country; her values and ideals for nothing but flattery. Trump’s conduct was a national embarrassment that was cheered

3/ by our adversaries. Trump fetishized the world’s strongmen and lambasted our allies. He was as indifferent to repression abroad as he was to democracy at home. He was a Buffon set loose upon the stage and everyone played their part. Fear and self interest motivated some while

4/ others saw the opportunity to rise in a world that valued loyalty and standing with the leader above all other conceivable considerations. An ideology formed that blended performative cruelty with malice, incompetence, extremism and dishonesty. Through it all

5/ stood Trump. Predictable and steady. Our rancid and despicable Rock of Gibraltar, impregnable and immovable from the American consciousness. He has blighted the culture for more than 40 tedious years. In all that time, it wasn’t until he got to Washington DC that he found

6/ marks naive enough to believe there is an actual strategy to it all.