If Putin bet on Trump, he bet wrong

If that is the case, Putin is like millions of Americans who voted for Trump in the hope of electing someone who would not govern as a conventional Republican. Just as many people who had supported President Obama’s re-election pulled the lever for Trump because they trusted him to be a prudent steward of our entitlement programs and a pragmatic job creator who would put full employment and the maintenance of infrastructure above conservative orthodoxy, anyone in Russia going out of his way to tip the scales for Trump must have been counting on the idea that he would be a moderate realist in foreign policy rather than a hawk in the mold of his Democratic opponent and lawmakers in the vanguard of his adopted party. Indeed, concern that Trump would be insufficiently committed to playing hardball with Russia and Iran was one of the reasons that Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were reluctant to lend support to their party’s eventual nominee — and the hope that he would be more prudent was perhaps the only thing that Sen. Rand Paul, a dovish libertarian, liked about the man who had not long ago been an advocate of single-payer health care.