Trump’s View of the World Is a Delusional Fantasy

Around 12 a.m. on Friday, soon after Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention stem-winder ended, James Fallows, the former White House speechwriter who has been an astute analyst of his successors’ work ever since, tweeted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I’ve heard over the years, this was overall the worst.”

Not having immersed myself in the enterprise as deeply as Fallows, I can’t assess whether Trump’s was the worst, but it could be a standout for weirdest and most jam-packed with egregious, megalomaniacal lies.

As many have commented, the first 15 minutes or so presented a Trump we have never seen, a new man in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt: subdued, almost modest, questing for unity. Then, his eyes shifted away from the teleprompter, and for the next hour or so, it was the same old grievance-laden Trump—the stolen election, the weaponized prosecutors, the media’s failure to give him credit, the dozens of people (ranging from kings and prime ministers to mechanics and waitresses) who, in the conversations he recounts, refer to him as “sir.”

His words about foreign policy and world politics were particularly brazen in their mendacity. Let’s go over his more notable eyebrow-raisers:

“Our opponents [meaning Joe Biden when he took office in 2021] inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war.” It’s true Trump didn’t start any conflicts, but the world was rife with wars—and 65 U.S. service members were killed in battle, 45 of them in Afghanistan, during his term. (By contrast, 16 have been killed since Biden became president.)

“Under President Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under President Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under the current administration, Russia is after all of Ukraine. Under President Trump, Russia took nothing.” Not quite. Russia’s war to take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which began in 2014, continued all through Trump’s term. (From 2014–22, before Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, about 14,000 soldiers on both sides were killed.) Trump assisted Russia by refusing to deliver Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to dig up dirt on Biden’s son Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company. (This blackmail was the subject of Trump’s “beautiful phone call” with Zelensky—and of Trump’s first impeachment trial.)

Trump’s contempt for Zelensky makes this next comment particularly risible: “The horrible war with Russia and Ukraine … would have never happened if I was president.” In fact, given the blackmail and Trump’s consistently friendly attitude toward Putin, the Russian president would have assumed—and, if Trump returns to the White House, will continue to assume—that he can get away with anything in this war. In fact, Trump has told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (a Putin ally whom he praised in his convention speech) that his plan to immediately end the war is simply to cut off all aid to Ukraine.

“The war caused by the attack on Israel … would never have happened if I was president. Iran was broke. Iran had no money. Now Iran has $250 billion.” Iran supported Hamas over the years, but so did many other countries in the region—and, in any case, it didn’t take a lot of money for Hamas to launch its Oct. 7 attack.

Trump also claimed that Biden and his team “took off all the sanctions, and they did everything possible for Iran, and now Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, which would never have happened.” This is nonsense on so many levels. Iran is close to building an A-bomb because, in 2018, Trump scuttled the Iran nuclear treaty, which Barack Obama and six others had signed three years earlier and which Iran was obeying. However, Biden never lifted the sanctions; maybe he should have, to get talks back on track, but he didn’t.

“We stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now North Korea is acting up again.” Except for a brief period when Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held two summits (both of which went nowhere because each overestimated what the other was willing to give up), North Korea never stopped missile launches. In 2019 it tested 13 short-range missiles (Trump brushed them away, but the South Korean and Japanese governments were concerned) and started testing a new rocket engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile. Just before Trump left office in January 2021, Kim said his country could “miniaturize, lighten, and standardize nuclear weapons” to load them onto short- and long-range missiles.

“I got along very well [with] North Korea, Kim Jong-un. … He’d like to see me back too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.” Trump’s delusional bromance with the world’s most evil and oppressive dictator continues. During their summitry, Trump praised Kim’s “love letters” and said the two “fell in love.” Kim knew how to push all his buttons.

Trump is more susceptible to sycophancy than any leader outside a Marx Brothers movie. In another dizzying moment during the RNC speech, Trump boasted that the head of the Taliban had called him “Your Excellency.” Trump added, “I wonder if he calls the other guy [meaning Biden] ‘Your Excellency.’ I doubt it.”

It doesn’t take much even for terrorists and mass murderers to slide Trump into their pockets.

His remarks on Afghanistan were also distortions of the truth. He said that he and the Taliban leader had negotiated a “great plan” for U.S. withdrawal, but “the other guy”—meaning Biden—“gave him everything,” including Bagram Air Base. Trump said he would have kept Bagram because of its proximity to China.

All this is rubbish. Trump’s emissary negotiated a deal, behind the backs of the Kabul government, amounting to total, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He didn’t even demand a Taliban cease-fire as a precondition, as State Department specialists had urged. Biden’s execution of the pullout was disastrous, but Trump’s deal set the stage: The Kabul government was doomed by the time Biden entered the White House. There was no provision to hang on to Bagram.

Perhaps most jaw-droppingly, there was this remark about Israel’s Iron Dome system, which has successfully shot down many rockets and artillery shells fired by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed militias:

“Ronald Reagan wanted this many years ago, but we really didn’t have the technology. … Now we have unbelievable technology. And why should other countries have this and we don’t? No, no, we’re going to build an Iron Dome over our country, and we’re going to be sure that nothing can come and harm our people.”

The multiple levels of sheer ignorance here are staggering. First, Iron Dome was a co-production of the U.S. and Israel. We could have it if we want, but it fits Israel’s defense needs, not ours. It flies at roughly twice the speed of sound and is designed to shoot down short-range missiles and shells across a range of 2 to 43 miles. The U.S. military has air-defense systems—the Patriot and the ship-based SM-3—that are much better designed for our needs.

In any case, none of these systems is well suited to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles fired against the United States. (They have a range of more than 6,000 miles and fly at a speed of 20 times the speed of sound.) Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” envisioned a layered defense—weapons in space, at sea, and on the ground—tracking and shooting at Soviet ICBMs at various phases of their flight. The U.S. has been spending about $10 billion a year trying to perfect this vision, with mixed success at best.

Trump seems to think Iron Dome is like a dome. In any case, he has no idea what it is, what it’s for, how it works—or how difficult it is, despite 30 years of expensive R&D and testing, to protect the United States from missiles fired from thousands of miles away.

I could go on and on. Trump’s view of the world is a fantasy, and his ideas of how to fix its problems are magic. “I could stop wars with a phone call,” he said in Milwaukee. “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created. … I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately. … We’ll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further. … Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before, and we’re going to do it very rapidly.”

What is his plan? To return to the White House. Everything else, he seemed to suggest, will follow, almost automatically, from that providential arrival. “Only I can fix it,” Trump boasted at the Republican convention in 2016. He didn’t then, and there’s no sign he can do it now.