Hey, Foreign Leaders: Here’s What You Need to Know About Trump

As President Trump prepares to head to Asia next month for his most important overseas trip yet, foreign intelligence services are undoubtedly trying to assemble personality profiles to explain this unconventional, risk-taking, domineering president to the leaders he will meet.

How will they describe Trump? Probably not with the same hyperbole we sometimes use in our daily news commentary. Foreign governments aren’t as easily shocked or offended as American journalists. They’re used to bullying autocrats. They watch Trump’s nonstop circus act, probably with frequent dismay, but they must make policy decisions rather than value judgments.

Trump has been president for almost nine months now. If foreign analysts have been doing their reporting, they should discern some basic parameters of his presidency. They’re not Americans; they don’t have to evaluate Trump’s fitness to be president, or whether he has violated the Constitution. They must deal with the reality that he was elected, that he probably has more than three more years left in office, and that foreign governments misread him at their peril.