Other Views: Rogues' gallery: Trump likes despots for the example they set

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : And Trump touted North Korea's Kim Jong Un, "who was very nice, I will tell you," and just launched a new missile test as part of his goal of developing weapons capable of striking the United States.
55% : There's no need to really parse this for deeper meaning or read between the lines, no great mystery here as to why Trump seems most comfortable in this type of company.
54% : Trump wants to end more than two centuries of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States and import the autocratic methods of Xi, Putin, Kim and Orbán, those leaders he seems to so admire.
44% : Donald Trump doesn't seem to keep many people in his close circle of confidants -- one consequence of constantly, publicly and unabashedly tossing putative allies under a bus -- nor does he reserve much praise for people other than himself.
37% : Trump had kind words for "Viktor Orbán, the highly respected prime minister of Hungary" who this month derailed a $52 billion EU aid package to Ukraine defending itself from Russia's invasion.
23% : What these leaders have is what he wants, not surreptitiously but openly, with Trump and his advisers laying in detail how they'll purge the military leadership, install loyalists at all federal agencies, persecute political and social opponents and dissolve democratic guardrails.
20% : The tendency to hand-wave all this away is absurd since Trump already tried to overthrow the government once.
12% : Trump praised the very imperialist who launched that disastrous war, Vladimir Putin, favorably quoting the despot's assertion that the criminal cases into Trump's coup attempt, mishandling of classified documents and other misconduct were politically motivated -- a bit like defending your financial prowess by citing the endorsement of Bernie Madoff.Trump talked up Chinese President Xi Jinping, who flatly warned President Joe Biden that he intended to take Taiwan by force and is moving forward with the trial of Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai, who was held in solitary confinement for three years.

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