Donald Trump says that if the leader of ISIS compliments him, he’ll compliment the leader of ISIS right back.

If [Putin] says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.

–Donald J. Trump, speaking to Matt Lauer during interview, Sept. 7

I didn’t watch the debacle Wednesday, and that line by Trump is one I hadn’t read about until just now.

But now that I know about it, it occurs to me that it’s a good thing Donald Trump wasn’t president or British prime minister in, say, 1939.  There was, of course, Neville Chamberlain, but I don’t think Peace For Our Time was maintained for a few extra months before Hitler marched into Poland because Hitler said great things about Chamberlain.

Although maybe that would have worked had Hitler thought of trying it. It could have cut down on the negotiating time in Munich that resulted in the Pact.  By a lot, I guess.

____

UPDATE:  Okay.  I just posted this in the Comments thread in response to, well, comments in the thread:

Lordy, folks.  The Chamberlain reference was intended as a flip joke.  I had thought that “but I don’t think Peace For Our Time was maintained for a few extra months before Hitler marched into Poland because Hitler said great things about Chamberlain” would be recognized for what it was intended to allude to: that Chamberlain based his action on extremely serious facts—England needed time to build a war machine, which notwithstanding the increasingly obvious threat it had not done because of overwhelming resistance to the very thought of war among Brits in the wake of WWI—not on the basis of some personal ego thing.

I didn’t expect most readers to know that Britain badly needed to buy time, or so Chamberlain presumed, since it had very little in the way of military capacity then.  But I did expect people to get that my point was that no leader or would-be leader in his or her right mind would base foreign policy decisions on some opposing leader’s personal compliments to him or her.

C’mon, guys.  Seriously ….

Hope that takes care of it.

Meanwhile, I just read that Hillary Clinton became ill today at a 9/11 memorial event in Manhattan today.  I hope she’s okay.  I hope she’s okay.

Added 9/11 at 2:23 p.m.