Michael Cohen - Trump's Hostile Takeover Doctrine

Donald Trump doesn’t see foreign policy. He sees a hostile takeover. He never has, and he never will. Nations aren’t partners, allies aren’t equals, and treaties aren’t commitments; they’re obstacles standing between him and whatever asset he thinks he can seize next. Strip away the rhetoric and the flag-waving, and what you’re left with is the same instinct that guided him long before the Oval Office: win, take, control.

I know this because I watched him think this way in real time. Literally from 2003 to its end in 2011. Sitting with Trump in his 26th-floor Trump Tower office, he would regularly rant that George W. Bush was a moron. Not because Iraq was illegal. Not because it destabilized the region. But because Bush invaded Iraq and didn’t take the oil. That, to Trump, was unforgivable incompetence.

“What kind of idiot wins and leaves empty-handed?” he’d say, genuinely baffled. To Trump, war was just hostile acquisition. Had Bush never heard to the victor go the spoils, the phrase coined in 1832 by Senator William L. Marcy to justify Andrew Jackson’s spoils system? Trump didn’t treat that as a historical footnote. He treated it like a strategy memo.

Fast-forward to 2026, one week in, and Trump has finally operationalized the worldview he used to shout about behind closed doors.

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/trumps-hostile-takeover-doctrine