A makeshift center in Poland welcomes Ukrainian refugees 3:04
(CNN) --
Sometimes it's helpful to remember what things would have been like if Donald Trump had actually won the 2020 election.
Over the weekend, the former president took a look at how he might have handled the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it's delusional.
According to audio obtained by
The Washington Post
, Trump told a group of Republican donors in New Orleans that the United States should paint Chinese flags on its F-22 planes and then use those planes to bomb Russia.
"And then we say, 'China did it, we didn't do it, China did it,' and then they start fighting each other and we sit back and watch," Trump concluded.
What?
The naivety here is enormous.
(And that's just the beginning of the problem.) Does Trump really think the Russians would be so easily fooled?
That painting a Chinese flag on our planes is a ruse significant enough to fool the Russians?
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What's even worse than Trump's apparent belief that this, um, plan would work is what would happen if it did.
Is it really in America's interest to have two nuclear-armed countries fighting each other?
The instability this would cause on the world stage is unfathomable.
The Washington Post
reported that the audience of Republican donors laughed when Trump proposed his "pretend we're the Chinese" strategy.
What is much less clear is whether Trump was actually joking.
The testimony of a man who survived a Russian attack and lost relatives 2:50
If the past is any warning, there's every reason to believe he wasn't kidding.
Let us remember that this is a man who brought up the attempt to buy Greenland from Denmark.
And when they didn't accept him, he abruptly canceled a planned visit to the country.
"Denmark is a very special country with amazing people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's comments that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our scheduled meeting in two weeks to another time," he tweeted at the time.
This is also a man who sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin against US intelligence in deciding whether or not Russia actively interfered in the 2016 election.
ANALYSIS |
Trump has been on Putin's side in Ukraine's long fight against Russian aggression
And he is a man who denigrated immigrants from Central America and Africa, insisting that he wanted more immigrants from countries like Norway.
In short, Trump has shown us, time and time again, how incredibly unconventional he is when it comes to, well, just about everything.
Which means there is absolutely no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt on his most recent comments.
This also means that a former president of the United States, and the favorite to be the Republican candidate for 2024, may actually believe that the solution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to paint some Chinese flags on American planes in the hope of starting a conflict in the entire continent between Russia and China.
Which, well, is shocking.
Conflict Russia - Ukraine
