“Trump’s apparently innocent and bumbling gaffes expose the cracks, fragilities, and tensions in the system as well as its deeply illiberal, disordered, hierarchical, and fundamentally cruel character. His upsetting of the NATO applecart, stands as a paradigmatic case in point, as do his even more contradictory comments about Saudi Arabia, his praise for the economic policies of the dictator of Kazakhstan, and the quip about Boeing which some journalists treated as an international incident by virtue of its impact on the stock market. Trump’s perversely mean spirited spewing — his praise for anti-democratic regimes and dictators, his brazen nose thumbing at the military industrial complex — all point to the unsettling reality that the liberal global order that America provides is, at the end of the day, profoundly illiberal and disordered.”