Originally Posted by Chris

Given the comments he has already made about encouraging Putin to invade Nato states that don’t spend enough on defence, he is already damaging European security in ways that should concern you. Were he to actually become president, then you’d have a man in the most powerful chair in the world who has openly said how much he admires Putin (presently invading a sovereign country, responsible for the death of half a million of his own people to date, and likely half as many again including Ukrainians) and Xi (now circling Taiwan with an entire navy on a near-weekly basis under the pretence of ‘exercises’).

When you signal that you’re not serious about defending territory, dictators take note and are emboldened to act. That’s exactly why Argentina thought it could get away with it in 1982. It’s why Hitler kept getting away with it until 1939.

Trump is not a statesman, he’s a businessman - a bad one - with a mobster mentality. He admires strongmen and fancies himself as one, so he sucks up to them and doesn’t care who he treads on in order to get what he thinks he deserves. He is also now in serious cognitive decline (the shark speech from Las Vegas is just one recent example of how much difficulty he now has holding a train of thought ). So not only does he neither understand, nor care, how good international statecraft is done, he is mentally erratic and increasingly unpredictable.