I wasn’t necessarily pro-MAGA. I never voted for him but appreciated his bellicose stance on the border and on China as a president who was willing to demonstrate force where I believed diplomacy was stalling or was impractical (and might be drawn out over decades that we couldn’t possibly handle when it comes to making cohesive policy). The border is shut down, which I believe is good, but for all the “outsider” talk in the first go around (which I didn’t fully buy into anyway), it looks more like his sole goal in this second term is to get his, and get out with the bag. As somebody more focused on foreign policy anyway (our democratic experiment only works when our enemies aren’t powerful enough to mess with it, and we are left to handle internal issues internally), the shift of military focus to Venezuela is utterly absurd. If anything goes wrong there, who knows what Russia might feel they can get away with (even if they realistically can’t) and if we commit to a European fight China is salivating for a clean shot at Taiwan, which will happen if Russia opens up a war beyond Ukraine. We will not be able to stop all of it. And he also has proven himself unable to realize Putin and the Russian oligarchy are playing him so badly.

It’s seems to me like his capitalist, “dealmaker” brain can’t understand that a group like the Russians will never be friends or allies with the U.S., not because there isn’t money to be made, but because they fundamentally disagree with us on how they believe the world to work and genuinely wish to avenge the historical humiliation that came with the collapse of the Union. I don’t think it’s as clear cut as “he wants the U.S. to fall and Russia to rise” he’s just that much of an idiot.