Politics

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Tuesday night’s debate devoted little time to foreign policy, but a few key moments revealed—more dramatically than half an hour of dedicated discussion might have—just how much a renewed Donald Trump presidency could weaken the United States and make the world a more dangerous place.

Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.

“I like people who like me,” Trump has publicly said in several contexts, and the heads of every intelligence agency on Earth no doubt took careful note. “He respects me,” Trump once said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He famously sighed that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un sent each other “love letters,” and, even now, years after the bloom faded, still beams, “He likes me.” At the recent Republican convention, he boasted—boasted—that the head of the Taliban called him “Your Excellency,” and added, “I wonder if he calls the other guy”—meaning Biden—“ ‘Your Excellency.’ I doubt it!”

[Edit typo.]