This was all happening under an America First president who was temperamentally uninterested in complexity, who romanticized authoritarianism, and who dismissed any talk of Russian election interference as an elaborate “hoax.” That his trade war with China, his abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, and his refusal to confront Putin directly might have unintended and dangerous consequences seemed to matter little in the Old Western Trump had written for himself. In his retelling, he was Wyatt Earp restoring law and order, securing the border, and blazing his way to glory.
