National Security Expert: Putin Is the Only Person in the World Trump Is Genuinely Afraid Of
National Security expert Tom Nichols believes President Donald Trump is afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin and that’s why Putin is getting everything he wants without much effort. Nichols told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump’s performance at press conferences on Wednesday shows he doesn’t understand how the world works.
“The amazing part of that is that Putin is getting everything he wants without having to lift a finger,” Nichols said.
“I don’t think the President is somehow doing this on instructions. I think he has a kind of natural oppositional defiant disorder in the presence of adults. These are serious people.”
“These are people that are talking about serious things and the President is always out of his depth in those environments. And what you’re seeing, as David pointed out, is NATO is almost reforming itself to deal with the fact that the Americans are off the stage, and Putin is more than happy to see that because that means the Europeans will have to make their own deals with Russia if the Americans are out of the game.”
“I mean, when, you know, the Canadians and the French are rebuking the United States for not being an aggressive and, you know, strong presence in NATO, the world has really turned on its head, and Putin is getting everything he wants without having to say a word because Putin is the only person in the world Donald Trump is really, I think, genuinely afraid of.”
Nichols and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough discussed Trump’s affinity for dictators and Nichols pointed out that Putin was something special.
“I think Putin’s a special case because he’s always trying to stay off Putin’s radar, stay out of his way, but the President’s instinct is never to decide with the messy democracies and their leaders who actually have to, again, engage in the serious business of governing,” Nichols said.
“It’s always to side with the strongmen and the dictators who see things, you know, black and white, my good is my good, transactional, and that’s just his instinct. I think he just — he doesn’t understand alliances. He doesn’t understand let’s be honest, he doesn’t understand how the world works and he likes the much simpler model of just sort of ordering people around.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
