"Useful idiot", minor but important distinction. At the end of the day yeah, he's an "asset" in the sense that he's doing what Russia wants. But he’s not doing it because he's a traditional intelligence asset who's taking marching orders from Putin. He has no ideological loyalty to Russia, hell, he can't even muster that for the country he supposedly runs.

Rather, he has to be finessed into doing what you want. That can be a bribe (as we've seen many world leaders figure out for themselves) or it could just be simple praise. Throwing some narcissistic validation into the howling void where his heart should be.

Thing is, that gets both easier and more complicated as he gets more senile. Easier in the sense that (to the extent he ever had one) his conception of reality is eroding. That means he's becomeing even more malleable as even this most baseline level of resistance degrades.

It gets more complicated in the sense that the same is true for everyone else too. Trump's always had a tendency to agree with whoever spoke to him last, even before the very obvious recent decline in his mental faculties. Dementia is probably only going to make that worse.

The main upshot here is that if you know what your doing this man is more suggestable than ever. Which effectively means you now have to account for what eveyone else around is telling him and trying to accomplish. At least, to a greater degree than you were before.

Just a thought here, but maybe we'd have a slightly better time with leaders who aren't suffering from extremely obvious mental decline. Anyways, I look forward to the 2028 presidential election, when America will finally elect Ronald Reagan for a posthumous third term via the proxy of a ouija board operated solely by Henry Kissinger's corpse.