David French

And so you really get the sense that

Trump, the commander-in-chief, is flying by the seat of his pants.

The military is executing the missions it's being assigned to execute with extreme competence.

It's just that if you have a flawed strategy to begin with, if you have mercurial leadership at the top, even the best military execution will often just be wasted.

It can be true, Michelle.

It can be true because here's what I...

Donald Trump, I think, has trouble understanding the true believer.

Yeah.

In other words, the person who actually really, truly believes what they say.

Well, he's not a true believer.

And guess what?

He has gotten where he's gotten by steamrolling over a lot of people and exposing a lot of people to not be true believers.

So think about...

how many people in the Republican Party have bent the knee to Trump.

In spite of all of the depredations, all of the corruption, all of the departures from previous conservative orthodoxy, I mean, heck, his own vice president compared him to Hitler at one point, right?

Marco Rubio, his favorite, arguably his favorite member of the cabinet right now.

was virulently against Trump.

And so he's seen this happen so many times where people who have postured themselves as true, people of true conviction have just yielded.

And that now he's taking on, as opposed to a strongman regime in South America, which has some ideological components, of course, but it's still ultimately a strongman regime.

And then you go to