Walter Russell Mead
speaker
379 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Walter Russell Mead’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Okay.
Trump does not want either one of them to emerge as the successor or anybody else until the absolute last possible moment.
Trump wants to designate his successor pretty much the way Elizabeth I designated hers, on his deathbed in a whisper.
Because the moment one of those two people emerges as the successor, power starts to flow away.
Right.
So that's going to come as late as possible, as absolutely late.
And meanwhile, he does have these two wings of the coalition, the kind of Vance wing, which is more, you know, shady toward restrainer, suspicious of Israel and many other things.
And then the Rubio wing, which is more sort of closely aligned to kind of some traditional Republican thinking.
And Trump needs to be throwing a little chum to the Vance side, a little chum to the Rubio side.
That's how he does things.
And Trump is, I think, less on many, many issues.
He is less focused on achieving a specific policy outcome than he is on maintaining a specific power dynamic, one that keeps him elevated.
So I think many people get confused by Trump because they think he's trying to do things that he isn't trying to do.
They find it difficult to sort of say, OK, in the moment, what are the things that seem most important to Trump where he needs to do something?
Now, I don't claim to read his mind, but it does seem to me that if you think in these terms, a lot of what he does is easier to explain.
Whether or not...
They're not enough for everything.
Trump is, as I say in the column, Trump is not really a leader.
He's not someone, say like Abraham Lincoln, who has this vision of the nation.
vision of democracy, a clear-sighted idea.
Showing 121–140 of 379 · page 7 of 19
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