As world leaders and Donald Trump allies are well aware, the president can be convinced of just about anything if it plays into his own self-serving narrative. Kim Jong Un has been able to continue his missile testing because Trump believes his dialogue with North Korea represents progress no one else has made. Vladimir Putin got Trump to take his word for it that Moscow didn’t meddle in the 2016 election because any suggestion that he needed help defeating Hillary Clinton bruises his delicate ego. And Muhammed bin Salman was given a free pass after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi because the Saudi leader repeatedly denied involvement. Now, it seems Trump’s willful ignorance has not only empowered autocrats and damaged America’s standing on the world stage—it has also imperiled his presidency.

According to new reports, Trump’s antagonistic attitude toward Ukraine, which he pressured to investigate Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory about the DNC server, appears to have been partly informed by meetings with Putin, and Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister. In conversations with Trump this spring, the two leaders reportedly nudged the president toward a bleak view of Ukraine as a place of rampant, irreversible corruption, and urged him to adopt their hostile posture toward Kiev, current and former officials told the New York Times and the Washington Post. In a meeting just over a week after speaking with Orban, Trump told his administration that Ukrainians were “terrible people” and allegedly instructed diplomats to defer on matters related to Kiev to Rudy Giuliani who, at the time, was filling his head with conspiracy theories about the country.

It appears neither Orban nor Putin directly pushed those theories in their May meetings with Trump, officials told the Times and the Post, but in becoming convinced that Ukraine was “hopelessly corrupt,” the president may have been even more open to unfounded theories that Ukraine had “tried to take me down” in 2016. The conversations with Orban and Putin, both of whom are hostile to Ukraine, were disclosed to lawmakers during the testimony of George Kent last week, which came as part of House Democrats’ quickly-escalating impeachment inquiry, and were corroborated to the Times and Post by current and former officials familiar with the meetings.

This, of course, is not the first time Trump has gotten played on the world stage. Typically, his malleability gets him some bad headlines and a few concerned rumblings from Republicans. But reports about his conversations with Orban and Putin come as his handling of foreign policy threatens to turn even some in the GOP against him. First, there was the whistleblower complaint—corroborated by a rough transcript of his call with Volodymyr Zelensky, text messages between U.S. officials, witness testimonies, Mick Mulvaney, and Trump himself—that the president dangled military aid and a White House visit over his Ukrainian counterpart to get him to investigate Biden. That quid pro quo will almost certainly result in his impeachment in the House of Representatives, leading to a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate. Then, there was his reckless abandonment of U.S.-allied Kurds in Syria, leaving them at the mercy of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and potentially clearing the way for an ISIS resurgence. That angered even some Republican lawmakers who defended Trump in the Ukraine scandal, putting the spotlight on his shaky judgment.

That he was apparently manipulated by Orban and Putin compounds longstanding concerns about how Trump is conducting foreign policy. According to the reports, even several Trump administration officials were alarmed by his interactions with the foreign leaders; ex-national security adviser John Bolton and Fiona Hill, who testified last week about the scandal, were reportedly against the idea of an Orban visit entirely. Senior diplomats told the Post they had “limited insight” into all that transpired during that visit; however, one said, it was “clear that the meeting with Orban had solidified” Trump’s views on Ukraine.

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