Echoing Putin' Trump's prism of self-interest sets US policy goals

It was a language he could understand. Donald Trump had lost the 2020 US presidential election, Russia's Vladimir Putin told him last Friday, because it was rigged through mail-in voting.

- David Smith

It was a language he could understand. Donald Trump had lost the 2020 US presidential election, Russia's Vladimir Putin told him last Friday, because it was rigged through mail-in voting. Three days later, the president announced lawyers were drafting an executive order to halt mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly a third of Americans that has not been credibly linked to election fraud.

That an American president might take advice on how to run elections from a Russian dictator - who wins sham polls in a landslide while his opponents disappear or die - would have been unimaginable a decade ago. But it was not so surprising from Trump, who has made a habit of blurring the boundary between domestic policy grievances and foreign policy goals. He is uniquely vulnerable to manipulation, critics say, because he views national and international affairs through a single prism of self-interest.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: "In Donald Trump's world there's no significant distinction between what he does internationally and what he is doing domestically because it all centres on himself. There's no ideological through-line or consistency. It's all about what serves his own personal interests. The notion that you would roll out the red carpet for an internationally wanted war criminal 19 months after he murdered [opposition leader] Alexei Navalny would be vomit-inducing in any context. But given Trump's long history with Vladimir Putin, I suppose it should be expected."

The same attitude has been on display in Trump's approach to immigration, with countries such as El Salvador currying favour by imprisoning the victims of mass deportation, and in his claim that trade tariffs will produce a renaissance of domestic manufacturing. Sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba were framed as appeals to domestic constituencies such as Cuban and Venezuelan exile communities in Florida.