Aaron Retica

We've also gotten somewhere very weird.

Emily, you want to try to describe it?

Like, it's a tricky one, but like, where are we?

You also mentioned alliances, and David, I want you to take this up too.

For a long time, you would say, oh, he's undermining the alliance.

He's undermining the allies.

That's bad.

But of course, they don't see it that way.

The idea is just that we're suckers.

Oh, totally, totally.

So, Emily, looking over this year, there's two ways of doing it, right?

We can say they had a set of intentions, right?

and they did it all, or they're doing a lot of it.

Or we could say they had a set of intentions and they're kind of symbolic and they're not actually doing what they wanted to do or said they were going to do, or at least the effects are not what they wanted them to be.

I'm wondering where you come down in that discussion.

So the alliances that are against Trump, whether they're domestic or foreign, right, have a problem.

And that is they're about the rule of law.

They're about alliances.

They're about all these nice things, right?

None of which norms is another one, right?