Trump Sees a World on Fire, and Says He Knows Who’s to Blame

The companion element to Mr. Trump’s argument on Iran is that American weakness had allowed Hamas to commit the Oct. 7 terror attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. He has never fleshed this argument out — or explained why the United States should be considered more responsible than the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, which ignored for a year intelligence warnings that Hamas was preparing an attack and whose military responded far too slowly.

Ukraine

Nowhere does the accounting of history diverge more than over Ukraine.

Mr. Trump’s insistence that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch, because Mr. Putin “respected” him too much, is unprovable. And it is true that Mr. Trump provided Ukraine with a small number of defensive weapons that Mr. Obama had denied them, for fear the shipments would be too provocative to Russia.

But Mr. Trump leaves out from his description the fact that he fundamentally agreed with Mr. Putin’s goals. “Trump made it very clear, you know, that Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be a part of Russia,” his top Russia adviser at the National Security Council, Fiona Hill, recalled after she left Mr. Trump’s White House.

Mr. Trump’s move to withhold aid to the Ukrainian government, unless it provided political dirt about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, was at the center of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. Mr. Trump himself argued that Ukraine “tried to take me down in 2016,” and he claimed that Ukraine, not Russia, tried to interfere in that presidential election. No evidence has emerged to back up that view.

Now Mr. Trump argues he would resolve the war in 24 hours, without saying how. (He went further in his debate with Mr. Biden, insisting: “I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on Jan. 20. I’ll have that war settled.”) Presumably that would involve allowing Mr. Putin to retain territory he has seized, and forcing that resolution on Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president.

Ms. Harris has not announced a plan of her own for Ukraine, other than standing with the country and America’s allies in NATO. But she sees an opportunity to cast Mr. Trump as a danger to American national security, noting that “he encourages Putin to invade our allies” and that he has said Russia could do “whatever the hell they want.”