Is Trump channelling The Jungle Book in his obsession with Putin? | The News Agents

Trump can't compute, he can't understand that in his mind, Russia's bigger, America's bigger, therefore you little Ukraine should just do what we say, which is a, you know, a deeply kind of realist attitude to international relations, a deeply cynical one. It is, you know, the poor must suffer what they must. It is always Trump's sort of analytical framework. I do think that this is one of the greatest stains on America and its history of foreign entanglement that far from standing up for the underdog or fighting communism which it tried to do in Vietnam albeit absolutely cack-handedly, and awfully and losing this is about America siding with the aggressor siding with the autocrat siding with the kleptocrat i mean it is just incredible that a country that wanted freedom and that wanted democracy and that wanted to be firmly into the west's orbit is finding itself being treated as an enemy by the United States of America and i find it as a piece of American foreign policy incomprehensible that Donald Trump there is something bizarre about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin which we've talked about before but it really feels to me like you know that song in the Jungle Book I want to be like you i think King Louis Donald Trump wants to be the guy who's got the secrets of everything and just being king of his own jungle isn't enough he looks at Vladimir Putin thinks he's got everything i'd like to be an autocrat like that i'd like to have control over my country like that i'd like to have the longevity that you have i'd like to be able to control the industry and the firms and have people paying me off in their billions that would be my idea of heaven and he hasn't got it well i And the remarkable thing, John, isn't it, this week, is that Russia has made precisely zero concessions in exchange for Trump's decision to lift sanctions. Yeah. Like, none. None. As far as we know, Trump didn't even ask for any. Right? The White House hasn't said that he asked for any. And on top of that, at least you could say, whoa, if it's had some effect on diesel prices in the U.S., then no effect at the pump whatsoever. Average U.S. diesel price, $6.32 a gallon on Thursday compared to $6.29 a week ago. So all he's achieved is given Vladimir Putin a multi-billion dollar bone.