From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone calls alarm US officials

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so
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...so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies that
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...that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States
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The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including [McMaster, Bolton, Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly and intel officials] -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said
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he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.
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By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump
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Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."
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Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic [...] heir Mohammed bin Salman and [...] dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors
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In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations.
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They didn't know BS," [Trump] said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

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More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in real time or [had] detailed summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the calls soon after their completion.
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The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period

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The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest
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CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment.
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One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses
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to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

[Yeah, right ]
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compared [the] conversations [...] to Trump's [Covid briefings]: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation
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In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone conversations -- including [Macron, Trudeau, and Morrison] -- in the same [way he did with some of] America's governors.

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Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West,"
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the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.)

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He frequently justifies his seeming deference to Putin by arguing that Russia is a major world player and that it is in the United States' interest to have a constructive and friendly relationship -- requiring a reset with Moscow through his personal dialogue with Putin.

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two [...] officials [...] said the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States and its President

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“He gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War”
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giving Putin and Russia a legitimacy they never had
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He's given Russia a lifeline
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He's playing with something he doesn't understand and he's giving them power that they would use [aggressively]."
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Both officials cited Trump's decision to pull US troops out of Syria -- a move that benefited Turkey as well as Russia -- as perhaps the most grievous example. "He gave away the store," one of them said.

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The frequency of the calls with Erdogan -- in which [he] pressed Trump for policy concessions and other favors -- was especially worrisome [...] because of the ease with which Erdogan bypassed normal National Security Council protocols and procedures to reach [Trump]

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Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach [Trump] directly that some [...] aides became convinced that Turkey's security services in Washington were using Trump's schedule and whereabouts to provide Erdogan with information about when the President would be available

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On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf course and Trump would delay play while the two spoke at length.

Two sources described [Trump] as woefully uninformed [...], and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal terms
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“Erdogan took him to the cleaners”

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