Yesterday's embarrassment performance in the Oval Office, where a petulant Trump parroted Putin's talking points and went off on Zelensky for not being a lapdog, raises the question - along with everything else Trump has done - as to whether the US is a rogue state.
The US has always played by its own rules when it suited us. We take and leave compliance with international agreements as we see fit. In most cases, we try and abide by rules we helped write, but every once in a while, an administration comes along that flouts those rules. Dubya flouted them both with the invasion of Iraq and the torture of Al Qaeda operatives.
Trump has done more than flout or ignore those rules; he has lit them on fire and pissed on the ashes. He is nakedly aligned the country with other rogue states like Russia and - one could make a case - Israel. Trump is a career criminal, and international law is terribly weak. There is effectively no coercive power to enforce those laws. That's why we take and leave them as we need to. International laws both protect and bind weaker countries. Trump - again a career criminal - has realized that there is very little that truly binds America, so he is going to do whatever he thinks is best within the requirements of the moment for him.
L'etat c'est moi. Patrimonialism.
Of course the reason America has largely abided by these agreements is that there are all sorts of advantages of having allies and setting a good example. It has been in our interest, most of the time, to live by our word.
Trump, a man who cannot help by lie, has no honor, no sense of obligation to anyone but himself.
And so, America, the world's most powerful country, is now behaving as a rogue state, unbound by the rules she helped write.
What will follow, most likely, is the sort of international instability we haven't seen since World War II.
All because some voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin didn't like the price of eggs and were weirded out by the idea of a female president.
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