My first reaction to this was that Trump is really ignorant of French history — it wasn’t Napoleon I who redesigned Paris but his nephew Louis Bonaparte, through the master urban designer Georges-Eugene Haussmann, in the interest of producing a city more readily capable of being militarily controlled by the state against the possibility of new revolts. Moreover, historically speaking, Trump seems to have some vague idea of Russia’s military record since Napoleonic times even if he really hasn’t spent enough time to analyze the Napoleonic invasion in 1812 or Nazi Germany’s operation Barbarossa to understand, with a wider eye toward social, political, and military organization on both sides in both contexts, why each Russian invasion failed. It may or may not be the case that those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, but I feel more confident that those who fundamentally misunderstand history are doomed to extract the wrong lessons from it. If nothing else, your piece suggests to me that Trump is a strictly tangential thinker, approaching the surfaces of complex subjects without ever bothering to dig deeper, like someone with an attention deficit disorder. With regard to US-Russian relations, that is a scary thought!