At home and abroad US policy chaos has one constant: Trump’s self-interest

When Putin blamed the 2020 US election result on mail-in voting he bolstered a Trump obsession – just one example of the blurring of international goals and domestic grievances

It was a language he could understand. Donald Trump had lost the 2020 US presidential election, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told him last Friday, because it was rigged through mail-in voting.

Three days later, the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly a third of Americans that has not been credibly linked to election fraud.

That an American president might take advice on how to run elections from a Russian dictator – who wins sham polls in a landslide while his opponents disappear or die – would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

But it was not so surprising from Trump, who has made a habit of blurring the boundary between domestic policy grievances and foreign policy goals. He is uniquely vulnerable to manipulation, critics say, because he views national and international affairs through a single prism of self-interest.