Richard Feidler

Like a couple of times when he's met with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he's sort of come out like he's in a different movie than when he met with Zoran Mamdani.

he's in a different movie.

So to answer your question, yes, I think he's always in a movie.

Does that mean that he is detached from affairs of state?

I don't think so, because we're all in his movie now.

That is the affairs of state.

Yeah, no, that's the assumption of shame has always been faulty.

Yeah, Trump does not appear to have any shame.

He was at that point in Putin's, like during that meeting and at that press conference, he was in Putin's movie.

And he had a choice.

Did he want to be in his intelligence services movie, which would be kind of lonely and confrontational, or did he just want to bask in the limelight of Putin's movie?

Well, that was the first Trump administration.

The second Trump administration is much more militant and much more incompetent.

And, no, I mean, what I was talking about, and I'm not even sure that this argument needs to have made anymore after Doge, right?

But during the first Trump administration, people were sort of looking at them and saying, oh, maybe he has an autocratic agenda, but he's too incompetent to advance it.

And I thought, no, I think the incompetence is the point because he made it so clear that he thinks that the whole business of governing is invalid, it's illegitimate.

The government as America has constituted it needs to be destroyed.

The deliberative, the institutionalised, the systems of checks and balances, all those inspectors general who measure whether government is efficient or whether it's corrupt, all of that stuff.

Exactly.

He hated them even more once he got into office.