Actually he’s a pants-shitting, trundling confluence of all of the worst possible qualities a person could have in this context: He hates American citizens and believes he is above them, and he is personally embittered by the rejection he experienced by the elites and craves spite and retribution, and is committed to the interests of rival powers by choice or by pressure, and is a brainbroke stroke victim with advanced dementia who was never actually intelligent to begin with, and also is just in all of this out of self-interest, whether that’s profit, indulgence, or just plain evading prison and consequences for his many many crimes.

The issue here is that it can be, and is, many terrible things at once, but we humans tend to reduce everything to a single and primary cause… That’s not wrong to do, but it does blind us to the depth of the threat he poses and the future damage he will cause.