I saw western civilization pass before my eyes as Joe Biden drowned.

“Putin is waiting for Trump,” John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser has said. When the presidential debate turned to foreign policy, the former president made an apparently startlingly revelation. He implied that he had a previously unknown conversation with Vladimir Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, perhaps in late 2021 or early 2022. According to Trump, Russia’s president discussed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “When Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” That dream, of course, is the conquest of Ukraine as the restoration of the major piece of the collapsed Soviet Union after the cold war.

Biden, overprepared to hit his voluminous talking points, was not listening closely. He did not pick up Trump’s astounding claim: “I talked to him about it, his dream.” The president’s response was accurate and so concise his words jumbled. “And listen to what he said when he went in, he was going to take Kyiv in five days, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted, to re-establish Kyiv. And he in fact didn’t do it at all. He didn’t – wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost over –........

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