After I had written the post in which I called on the GOP to draft Netanyahu, I provided the list of his credentials to my wife and asked her to identify the person in question. She guessed it was Putin. I told her that, unlike Netanyahu, Putin didn’t have the support of the entire GOP, but the fact was that he met all of the other criteria in my list, which should tell you something about the current state of the GOP.
Inevitably, that brings us to Donald Trump.
Trump is portraying himself as a sort of American version of Putin: a strong man who can get things done. Not surprisingly, he spoken favorably about Putin in the past, and he supports Russian leadership in Syria. But just how similar are the man with no shirt and the man on golf cart?
There is less here than meets the eye. The bottom line with Putin is that he is still a former KGB agent–an icy, cynical bastard who puts on his Mussolini shtick because he thinks it helps him with the Russian public. Some of Trump’s bombast is probably just opportunism, but I have to think that some of it is exactly who he is. He would be no match for Putin.