Trump 38: Donald Trump and the Wall of Lies

[fraurosena]

Uhm.... wut?

 

[Howl]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

I lol'ed at Ed Krassenstein's reaction to that screaming tweet.

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is the day Trump became presidential 

[formergothardite]

Well looks like Trump has no plans on becoming a better person for 2019. 

[fraurosena]

Nope. If you want presidential, you need this:

 

[Howl]

Darn.  I wonder how I'd tweet if I snorted four or five rails of Adderall first thing and drank a case of diet coke.  I'd be all over that ALL CAPS shit. 

[onekidanddone]

I get keeping the kids out of the limelight as the Obamas did with their girls, but Rufus all mighty, does that man ever see his youngest EVER?  Maybe it is a good thing he doesn't.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump turned the White House into a madhouse"

Spoiler

I drove past the White House the other day. It had been a while, and the place seemed smaller, somewhat tawdry, almost haunted. I imagined bats winging in and out, spider webs in the corners, and the president upstairs in the family quarters, talking back to the TV, railing against Nancy Pelosi, the Federal Reserve, Robert S. Mueller III, Emmanuel Macron, Theresa May, Jim Mattis, Jeff Sessions, Stormy Daniels and . . . who am I forgetting? Oh, yes, Barack Obama for, well, everything.

The car slowed. I thought I heard a wail from the upper floor: President Trump going mad.

Or maybe I am. I would not be surprised. Trump has that effect on people. It’s hard to believe we’re into another year and he’s still the president of the United States. The shock of it has not worn off. He has never achieved normalcy. Often, when I see him on TV, I react with a kind of nausea: Him! How? I know, the electoral college. I know, a slice of three states. Yes, yes, but how did we elect such a dummy, such a liar, such a baby, such a fool, such a dirty man? He walks the same halls Abraham Lincoln did. He sleeps where the Roosevelts did. He bathes where the visiting Winston Churchill did. Would Churchill have ever visited this president?

Trump has soiled America. He has not made it greater but, in a word, whose need is now apparent, worser. The America that previous presidents boasted about — Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” — is now a slum among nations. The goodness of the American people, another refrain of presidents past, is now a mere memory. But American goodness was always like the banner that tour guides held up: Follow me. Follow the United States because we saved Europe from the Nazis and Asia from Imperial Japan — and then Europe again, this time from the Stalinist thugs of Soviet communism. We saved Berlin with an airlift and eradicated polio with a vaccine. We thought we were good people. We thought we were great people.

Trump wants to make America great again. It is an old presidential refrain. John F. Kennedy used it over and over again in his 1960 campaign against Richard M. Nixon. “This is a great country,” he’d say. “But I think it could be a greater country . . . I think it’s time America started moving again.”

The amazing thing is that the previous administration had been Dwight D. Eisenhower’s. Looking back now, that era is known for a kind of kitschy middle-class affluence: the huge cars, the creep of suburbia, the martinis of “Mad Men” and, in general, a sense that things were pretty good — for white men in particular. But, overall, with no war and a thriving economy, things may never have been better.

The reason the brief Kennedy presidency still shines — despite the steady involvement in Vietnam and the messiness of his private life — is not just his image of high glamour but the urgency of his rhetoric. His call to follow his own example, his call to do good, his call to government service was compelling. Contrast it with Trump’s disparagement of federal workers. Kennedy asked; Kennedy asked not. Presidents have measured themselves against him ever since.

Not Trump, though. He is a rhetorical pratfall. His soul is dark. His vision is to shrink the traditional American spirit. He offers the world no moral leadership and slaps the back of authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin. He lies with every breath — not because he must, as Eisenhower did about the downing of Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane — because it’s the easier course. There’s not a parent out there who wants his or her child to be like Trump.

Trump’s one certain achievement will be to leave his successor an America that will become greater just by his leaving office. A president who does not lie, who does not try to buy the silence of a porn star, who makes his taxes public, who leaves moneymaking behind, who does not turn his political party into a beer-hall collection of ideological goons, who rages at the murder of a journalist by a foreign country, who respects the importance of a free press . . . such a president will make America greater just by showing up.

Now, though, as I pass the White House, it looks sad, the home of a hoarder — lies and scandals and crimes spilling out of the closets and Trump tweeting some inanity. It’s a madhouse that I’ve conjured. It’s a madman we’ve elected.

 

[Dandruff]

Does he do his own hair or does someone do it for him?

[fraurosena]

Here's an example of the ingenuity of people desperate to get into a country. It's also an example of how a border wall will never work. It's an example of the futility of the current federal shutdown because of presiduncial pettiness.

 

[Flossie]

Think of the many ways people escaped from East Germany, like this story:

East Germany Balloon Escape

Eight people made their own home made hot air balloon out of raincoats to cross the border at approximately 2:00 AM on September 16, 1979.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump doesn’t understand his leverage is gone"

Spoiler

The Post reports:

President Trump has invited congressional leaders to the White House for a briefing on border security, the first face-to-face session involving Republicans and Democrats as the partial government shutdown entered its second week. . . .

“Border Security and the Wall ‘thing’ and Shutdown is not where Nancy Pelosi wanted to start her tenure as Speaker! Let’s make a deal?” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

One wondrous result of the 2018 election, we will discover, is the near-total irrelevance of Trump’s tweets. He can say whatever wacky thing he wants, throw out whatever insults he pleases, but Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, is not going to be thrown off track or even alarmed. She takes his tweets as confirmation he is clueless and unstable.

Of course, Pelosi would like nothing better than to demonstrate Democrats can govern and the Republican Senate cannot. (“Pelosi responded to Trump’s ‘let’s make a deal’ invitation by tweeting that the president had “given Democrats a great opportunity to show how we will govern responsibly & quickly pass our plan to end the irresponsible #TrumpShutdown — just the first sign of things to come in our new Democratic Majority committed to working #ForThePeople.”)

Pelosi has her plan ready to go: Pass a clean resolution for six of the seven appropriations bills to fund through the end of the fiscal year and the Homeland Security appropriations through Feb. 8. Trump cannot prevent her from doing it, nor can Freedom Caucus gadfly Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who declared the move a “non-starter” — as if his consent were necessary.

We’ll have to see how Pelosi manages Trump’s temper tantrums, lies and incoherence but so far the approach has been four-fold. First, engage the president publicly and correct him/fact-check him in real time. This reminds voters that Trump is not operating in the real world and his positions aren’t tethered to reality. Second, make certain Trump is on the wrong side of public opinion. In the case of the border wall and the shutdown, voters oppose both. This further diminishes Trump’s leverage and puts pressure on Republicans to split from him. Third, make clear, concise statements of policy. This gives voters a sense that she is in command while Trump blathers on for days, changing his mind and contradicting his advisers. Finally, don’t negotiate against herself. Trump, as she wisecracked, has gone from a wall to slatted fence to “a beaded curtain.” Mocking Trump and pointing out his weakness infuriate him, demoralize his cult-followers and delight her base.

None of this guarantees that Trump will govern sensibly or recognize the error(s) of his ways. To the contrary, Pelosi assumes he is unteachable. Rather, her strategy is designed to maintain Democratic unity, fracture the Republicans and demonstrate that her party is more reasonable and competent than his.

Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have one more advantage over Trump: the stock market. Even the promise of a meeting between Republicans and Democrats fueled an uptick in the Dow Jones futures market, further indication that Trump’s shenanigans (e.g., a trade war, a shutdown, attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve chairman) harm markets, which in turn freak out Trump, prompt the Republican Party’s donors to grow anxious and, worst of all, threaten the only thing keeping him afloat, the economic recovery.

In sum, Democratic pols, progressive pundits and ordinary voters should follow Pelosi’s example. Don’t get mad. Get even — and keep pounding away at the truth. Voters can figure out between Trump and Pelosi who’s operating in the real world.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The walls around Trump are crumbling. Evangelicals may be his last resort."

Spoiler

Why does President Trump continue to keep the government shut down over his demand for a border wall, when large majorities oppose it? The most obvious answer is that he senses his long-term political survival depends on keeping his wall-adoring base behind him as his legal travails mount.

What is more interesting, though, is that the core of that base support may grow increasingly dependent on the white evangelical Christians who continue fervently supporting Trump no matter what he says and does. And for these voters, it appears, the wall is an extraordinarily potent totem, one whose significance for them calls for better explication as we head into a protracted showdown over it.

On Wednesday, Trump will meet with Democratic leaders over the shutdown and the wall. Axios reports that Trump will stage this meeting in the Situation Room to dramatize “security concerns at the border,” which is absurd, since in reality the wall has little to do with border security and is only about giving him the win he thinks he needs.

But this also shows again that Trump senses just how important the wall has become as a political theater piece in the eyes of his base. And one fascinating component of this is white evangelical support for it.

Among white evangelical Christians, support for the wall has risen nearly 10 points since Trump campaigned on it. In the most recent PRRI poll, in September 2018, a staggering 67 percent of them favor Trump’s wall. PRRI provided me with data on this question going back to April 2016:

White evangelical Christian support for Trump may perhaps prove his strongest bedrock, an important key to holding his base. Ron Brownstein recently analyzed the 2018 election results and found that key elements of his blue-collar white base moved away from Republicans — with the exception of white evangelicals, who instead showed a “hardening loyalty” to the Trump-era GOP. There appears to be a schism on the wall in particular, with some groups of non-evangelical whites opposing it while evangelical whites continue to overwhelmingly support it.

Why is the wall so important to this segment of Trump’s base in particular? Robert Jones, the head of PRRI, told me that the wall powerfully symbolizes the deeper reasons they supported Trump in the first place.

“For white evangelicals who see the sun setting on white Christian dominance in the country, the wall is a powerful metaphor,” said Jones, who has spent many years analyzing the attitudes of religious voters, and published the book “The End of White Christian America.”

Jones added that this metaphor embodies a white evangelical view of the world “as a dangerous battleground” made up of “chosen insiders and threatening outsiders,” as well as an “embattled minority trope that is rooted deep within southern culture,” such as the “Lost Cause theology following the Civil War,” and in “evangelical culture generally.”

White evangelicals will never abandon Trump

In recent weeks, there has been renewed attention to the true nature of white evangelical Christian support for Trump, and its remarkable durability in the face of revelations of Trump’s sordid personal behavior and corruption. This has been prompted by the release of a new movie, “The Trump Prophecy,” which tells the tale of a former firefighter who experienced an epiphany in 2011 that Trump would be elected president.

Analyzing the film, Katherine Stewart, a journalist who covers the Christian right, notes that it positions Trump as a modern-day “King Cyrus,” the 6th-century B.C. king of Persia who freed Jews from captivity in Babylon. As Stewart notes, Cyrus is the “model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the faithful,” and in the eyes of white evangelicals, Trump plays that role. In this telling, Trump is a savior figure for “Christian nationalism,” so his personal failings and misconduct are beside the point. Indeed, Stewart notes, his autocratic and anti-democratic conduct is a virtue, since it is being marshaled toward that end of rescuing evangelical culture from extermination.

As Stewart points out, some leading evangelical figures have even talked about this in wall metaphors. One such figure, who appears in the film, has declared that “America has become a nation without walls,” and that Trump will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”

On this score, historian John Fea has noted a longtime strain in white evangelical culture of “racial and religious fear” built on anxiety over immigrants, secularization, modernization and demographic change. While white evangelicals are not a monolith, Fea argues, many believe Trump is God’s vessel for “delivering them from the ‘captivity’ of the Obama administration,” so there’s little Trump could do that would “lead white conservative evangelicals to abandon him.”

‘Walled States, Waning Sovereignty’

All this taps into a broader global trend documented in Wendy Brown’s remarkable book, “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.” In multiple countries, walls are becoming political totems and theater pieces that reassure those anxious about the waning sovereignty of nations. Walls appear deeply ahistorical as responses to the actual challenges to national sovereignty mounted by the facts of 21st-century globalization, Brown writes, but their overtones of long-vanished historical times are key to what makes them reassuring.

And so, it may seem unhinged when Trump tweets that...

Throughout the ages some things NEVER get better and NEVER change. You have Walls and you have Wheels.

... but he may well be tapping into deeper impulses on the part of his most fervent supporters, which could be helping to keep that bond so tight.

All of which makes it more likely that if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and probes by the incoming Democratic House close in around Trump, these voters may end up being his most loyal backers.

“Even if Trump loses support among other parts of his 2016 base, the data suggests white evangelicals may be the last loyalists standing by his side,” Jones told me. “As Democrats take control of the House and as the Mueller investigation advances, white evangelicals look to be building their own wall of defense around Trump.”

Trump may end up needing their wall as much as they think they need his.

 

[fraurosena]

More evidence that the petulant and petty presidunce is socially, morally, ethically and intellectually completely and utterly unfit.

Draft-dodger Trump says he ‘would have been a good general’ while trashing James Mattis in Cabinet meeting rant

Quote

President Donald Trump ended former Defense Secretary James Mattis’ tenure as defense secretary right before the New Year, seemingly in retaliation for a letter Mattis published criticizing President Trump’s global policy.

At a cabinet meeting Wednesday, the President lashed out at Mattis.

“What’s he done for me? How had he done in Afghanistan? Not too good,” Trump said.

“As you know, president Obama fired him, and essentially so did I,” he added. In fact, general Mattis tendered his resignation after Trump announced the hasty withdrawal of troops from Syria. The President has since said he would slow the troop withdrawal.

“I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” the President added.

 

[fraurosena]

The shit spouting forth from the stable genius's mouth...

 

[Audrey2]

58 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

More evidence that the petulant and petty presidunce is socially, morally, ethically and intellectually completely and utterly unfit.

Draft-dodger Trump says he ‘would have been a good general’ while trashing James Mattis in Cabinet meeting rant

 

Of course he thinks he would have been a good general. That's another role in which you make a pronouncement and others must comply, much like being the CEO of a business empire. He thought that being President would make him all powerful. Instead, he's learned that Congress and the courts have their own powers, despite his attempts to fill the courts with yes men.

He wants to be a dictator and have authority over everything.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s bizarre history lesson on the Soviet Union, Russia and Afghanistan"

Spoiler

President Trump said a lot of strange, untrue things after Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting. But the most bizarre snippet might have been his “history” lesson on the Soviet Union.

Trump, who has assured us he is the foremost expert on many topics for which he has no formal education or training, gave his own version of why the USSR collapsed. And to be clear, it is his own version.

Here’s what he said:

“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. … The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”

The overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan is obvious. The USSR invaded in 1979 and left a decade later, in 1989. The superpower dissolved shortly thereafter in 1991.

But correlation is not causation. And Trump — who was using that anecdote to argue that the United States should pull out of Afghanistan and Syria — is really straining for causation here.

Let’s take this piece by piece.

“Russia used to be the Soviet Union.”

This might be the truest thing Trump said, but it’s only partially true. While Russia and the Soviet Union are often used interchangeably, there were 14 other republics also bundled into the USSR. Today’s Russia has about half the population of the Soviet Union. But we’ll forgive the president this popular shorthand.

“Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. ... And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union."

First off, “bankrupt” isn’t the correct term. The Soviet economy did collapse, but bankruptcy entails the dissolution of debts, and Russia assumed responsibility for most of the Soviet obligations after 1991. (This is a distinction, it bears noting, that Trump should be well familiar with.)

As for Afghanistan’s role? It was perhaps among the many reasons the USSR collapsed. But it was not the reason.

"I think most scholars would agree that Afghanistan was a contributing factor in the Soviet collapse, but I don’t think anyone would go so far as to pin sole blame for the collapse on Afghanistan or to say that the Soviets went ‘bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,’ ” said Sarah Cameron, a historian who studies Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Maryland.

And Afghanistan’s role in the collapse was more military- and perception-based than economic. A world power that helped defeat Nazi Germany and had crushed uprisings within its borders was suddenly viewed as weak and unable to control a small country.

“The moral, social and political costs of the war were substantial and contributed to the crisis of the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t a decisive financial burden,” said Eric Lohr, another expert at American University. “By far, the Soviet Union’s biggest financial problem was declining oil prices through the ’80s. Then Perestroika [a political and economic restructuring] unleashed all kinds of problems that hit the performance of the state economy, the state budget. The costs of Afghanistan were significant, but not on anything like that scale.”

“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia.”

This is simply not true. The Soviet Union ventured into Afghanistan as part of its effort to prop up communism abroad, not because terrorists were striking the Soviet homeland.

“The most shameless Soviet propagandist never claimed that Afghan terrorists were attacking Russia,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University. “You can read all Soviet media in the 1980s and never find anything this ridiculous.”

There was ultimately a problem with extremism in Afghanistan, but it developed largely after the USSR left, and the mujahideen groups that sprang up to fight the Soviets devolved into the Taliban.

“They were right to be there.”

This isn’t so much a fact check as an aside. It’s remarkable and unprecedented for a president of the United States to argue that the Soviet Union was right to be in Afghanistan, regardless of the purported reasons. The United States, after all, was on the other side, aiding the mujahideen.

"A lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”

It’s not clear to what Trump is referring when he says “a lot of the places you’re reading about.” The other countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. About the only one that is regularly in the news is Ukraine — thanks to the Russian incursion into Crimea.

Good grief. 'nuff said.

[GreyhoundFan]

A little more on the crazy cabinet meeting: "A defensive Trump calls a Cabinet meeting and uses it to boast, deflect and distract"

Spoiler

President Trump, 12 days into a government shutdown and facing new scrutiny from emboldened Democrats, inaugurated the new year Wednesday with a Cabinet meeting. It quickly became a 95-minute stream-of-consciousness defense of his presidency and worldview, filled with falsehoods, revisionist history and self-aggrandizement.

Trump trashed his former secretary of defense, retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, as a failure after once holding him out as a star of his administration.

“What’s he done for me?” Trump said.

He claimed to have “essentially” fired Mattis, who had surprised the White House by resigning in protest last month after the president’s abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria.

And Trump, who did not serve in the military and received draft deferments during the Vietnam War, suggested he would have made a good military leader himself.

“I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Trump said.

He took credit for falling oil prices, arguing they were the result of phone calls he made to the leaders of oil-producing nations.

“I called up certain people, and I said let that damn oil and gasoline — you let it flow, the oil,” he said.

And Trump defended his push to fund his promised border wall, parrying complaints from Democrats who have called the wall immoral by remarking, “Then we have to do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.”

Trump is entering his third year in the White House with his presidency at its most challenging point.

Democrats bent on investigating his administration and stymieing his agenda will take control of the House on Thursday. The thriving economy he once touted as evidence of his success is showing signs of strain, with financial markets tumbling in recent weeks due in part to worries over his policies and stewardship of the government. And his new year began with former GOP presidential nominee and incoming Utah Sen. Mitt Romney penning a harsh critique, cheered by the president’s Republican detractors, that argued Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office.”

Trump seemed mindful of all this Wednesday as he attempted to seize the spotlight by staging an unusual Cabinet meeting that was geared more toward garnering public attention than serving as a venue for the internal deliberations of his administration.

After saying last month that he would proudly take responsibility for the government shutdown over wall funding, he sought to blame Democrats for not sticking around over the holidays to negotiate. He said he stayed in Washington because the border security debate was “too important a subject to walk away from.”

“I was here on Christmas evening. I was all by myself in the White House — it’s a big, big house — except for the guys on the lawn with machine guns,” he said.

But Trump added confusion to the debate by undercutting Vice President Pence, seated nearby, in dismissing the offer he and other administration officials made to Democrats late last month of accepting $2.5 billion for the wall.

He described the recent stock sell-off as a “glitch” and said markets would soar again on the strength of trade deals he plans this year. But House Democrats may stand in the way of the first of those, a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and markets have been rattled most by the tariffs Trump has imposed on China.

Trump dismissed Romney’s scathing criticism of how he’s conducted his presidency, saying Romney should be more of a “team player,” and played down the idea he could face a primary challenge in 2020.

“They say I am the most popular president in the history of the Republican Party,” Trump said.

Amid concerns within his own party about whether he will pull troops out of Afghanistan, Trump offered a discursive and somewhat inscrutable account of the fall of the Soviet Union, blaming it on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump said.

His point was that the United States should pull out of hopeless and expensive wars, but he skipped over the many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as he held up the loss of empire as an example.

“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there,” he said breaking with the stance taken by past U.S. administrations that the invasion was an illegitimate power play against a neighboring nation. “The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”

The semblance of a traditional Cabinet meeting broke out from time to time, including when Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, joining by video connection, briefed the group on the administration’s border security efforts and set the tone by claiming, “Mr. President, now more than ever we need the wall.”

Trump’s Cabinet is pocked by vacancies, as the roster of deputies and placeholders around the table illustrated.

Mattis’s formerly prominent place at the Cabinet table was occupied Wednesday by a little-known deputy, Patrick Shanahan, who mostly looked down at his notes as Trump called Syria, where more than 2,000 U.S. troops are deployed, a lost cause of “sand and death.”

Several officials in attendance interjected praise for the president at different points.

“I want to thank you for the strong stand you have taken on border security,” Pence told him.

Trump, a large poster of himself evoking “Game of Thrones” on the table before him, complained about allies and partners from Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and Germany. They don’t pay their way or expect too much from the United States, Trump said, claiming anew that he is insisting on a reboot of the old expectations about U.S. aid and military obligations.

He claimed that if he wanted to, he could have any government job in Europe and be popular there. He cast his unpopularity among European publics as a sign he is doing his job well.

He defended his controversial negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by stating that if he had not reached out, there would have been a “big fat war in Asia.”

A second summit with Kim will happen soon, Trump predicted. He did not mention Kim’s veiled threat, in a New Year’s message, that the United States must not try his patience.

Trump’s critics and skeptics on North Korea say he lost leverage by agreeing to the first summit last year and would only lose more with another face-to-face meeting now.

The president, who frequently faces criticism for his light public schedule, also bemoaned the lack of credit he has received for what he views as the many accomplishments of his first two years.

“I have to tell you, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t do anything, if I just sat and enjoyed the presidency, like a lot of other people have done,” Trump said.

 

[Ozlsn]

13 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

He wants to be a dictator and have authority over everything.

Basically I think he wants to be Putin. He doesn't realise that Putin is a lot smarter, and a hell of a lot tougher - working your way up through the ranks of the KGB and then out-maneuvering well resourced competitors will do that. Trump thinks 'ruthless' means failing to pay subcontractors and undercutting business rivals. Putin thinks 'ruthless' means your rivals/critics/nationalists/journalists  and frequently innocent bystanders end dead in a variety of unpleasant ways. Not even close.