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This is Kickass News, I'm Ben Mathes.

From praising dictators to alienating allies, President Donald Trump has made chaos his calling

card. As his strategy caused more problems than it solved, CNN's chief national security

correspondent and anchor of CNN newsroom Jim Shudot tries to answer that question in a new book

titled The Madman Theory. Trump takes on the world. And today, Jim Shudot joins me on the

podcast to discuss the Nixon era origins of the so-called Madman Theory and how it applies to

Trump's scatter shot approach to national security. He talks about Trump's disdain for his own

national security team in favor of a shadow cabinet of informal advisors that wields enormous

influence over this president. He also reveals that the president's intelligence team deliberately

avoids bringing up Russia for fear of setting him off and how this has led to a dangerous

ignorance of America's number one geopolitical foe. He gets into the president's fraught relationship

with China, how Trump went from fire and fury to falling in love with Kim Jong-Un and what the

failed Hanoi summit taught him about the limits of personal diplomacy. Plus, how the Pentagon dangled

oil money to keep the president from withdrawing out of Syria, one source who makes the cryptic claim

that Vladimir Putin is Donald Trump's honey pot and what Trump's golf game can teach us about his

approach to foreign policy, coming up with CNN's Jim Shudot in just a moment.

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