So much for the Trump-exudes-real-seriousness-when-he's-abroad narrative

If there are any two nation-states that he ought to be handling with the utmost responsibility, it would be North Korea and Russia, right?

Well, during a couple of moments of idle time on the Vietnam stop of his Asia tour, he foreclosed on that possibility.

How's this for some measured, mature rhetoric?

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!

You see, DJT can never let a slight, from anyone in any circumstance, go unaddressed. Even if the source is an unstable dictator on the verge of being able to deliver a thermonuclear device to any US city.

And it seems he has deleted the long list of buzzings by Russian planes of US ships and US reconnaissance aircraft, the cyberattacks, the clearly steadfast sense of alliance that Russia has for the Assad regime in Syria (including the installation of an S-300 missile system),  participation with China in war games in the South China Sea, and ongoing threat to Ukrainian sovereignty from his memory bank. The guy apparently thinks he can start from a blank slate with a regime whose interests clearly diverge from those of the US:

When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics - bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!

Spin that, slavish devotees. A principle reason you gave for voting for, and exhorting the rest of us to vote for, this guy was that he would bring an American-interests-first resolve to matters of foreign policy. It turns out we get the patty-cake-ism we would have gotten with a President BleachBit. Expressed with exclamation points and choppy syntax as a bonus.

If Trump is this easily taken in by the alpha-male charm of a grand-scale schemer who has as his aim the sidelining of the US on the world stage, we have not entered into any kind of new era of security.

And recall that this comes on top of his calling the military parade in Beijing "beautiful" and Xi's consolidation of Communist Party power on the scale of Chairman Mao a great accomplishment.

This is what you get when there is no discernible core, no consistent set of principles, in the guy currently holding the most powerful position in the world.