The Mighty Trump: No Kings, Just a Wee Bit Bigger

Plenty of people assume the president wants to be king. His recent behavior suggests something bigger: he doesn’t want to be a piddling king. He wants to be god. His behavior radiates it. There are all the rants, curses and bellicosity of the past. He has exhibited narcissism and megalomania. How else to explain his obsession with putting his name on virtually everything and actions that included posting a picture of himself as Christ and declaring that he was the greatest president of all time? The thin skin, retaliation and vindictiveness. The grandiosity and constant need for admiration. If another president did this, Trump’s supporters would be indignant about the blasphemy of it all.

Because of his thin skin he has consistently tried to intimidate the media. His Department of “Justice” subpoenaed New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns regarding Air Force One. He banned three major news outlets from the White House and said more were to follow. “I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them ‘alive.’ Seems like corruption to me!) from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS!” “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,”

Recently, he railed at the Federal Reserve for raising the fed funds target rate by a measly 25 basis points, insisting the rate should be 1 percent or lower. He threatened the Fed itself with a truly bizarre warning that if it didn’t lower rates he might just cut off trade with every country running a surplus against the U.S. and save $1.5 trillion in the process. He never followed through — so does that count as a TACO? He has, at one point or another, threatened nearly every country on Earth — except Russia, China, and North Korea, which perhaps not coincidentally are all led by leaders who even Trump’s supporters would say are narcissistic and megalomanic. 

He tried to bring Canada to its knees economically because Ottawa had the nerve to resist his tariffs and defend its own sovereignty. Now Canada is on the verge of becoming an associate member of the EU, and Trump is treating that as a threat to American national security. Huh? How is this a threat to our national security? Isn’t that pure hyperbole? And why should he care? But it just the latest evidence that has become harder and harder to miss that the president has grown intoxicated with his own power and he lashes out harder each time someone dares to question him.

Does he not realize that the only reason Canada is turning to the EU is that he pushed it there? Canada’s Mark Carney has put forth the idea of his country becoming the EU’s first associate member out of sheer necessity arguing that closer ties with the continent would keep any single country (the U.S.) from controlling Canadian markets or undermining Canadian sovereignty. What choice does he have? Would Trump rather see a closer embrace with China?  

Carney pointed to deeper integration with the EU across trade, defense, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, energy, space, research, and financial services, aimed at making Canada and the EU less exposed to economic and geopolitical pressure from Washington. EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen embraced the idea to bring Canada in as the bloc’s first associate member — a status that does not currently exist in the bloc’s treaties and would have to be created. She said Europe wants to take its relationship with Canada to “the highest level possible.” Canada’s economy depends on the U.S. for roughly 70 percent of its trade, which leaves it especially exposed to Trump’s tariffs and his moods. Contrast that with the EU, which — like most other U.S. trading partners — caved to Trump’s demands, accepting a 15 percent tariff on European goods while dropping most tariffs on American goods.

Trump was apoplectic, calling Canada’s possible EU associate membership a potential “hostile act” and threatening additional tariffs on European countries if Canada was admitted. Someone explain to me how that makes any sense at all. His words: “If they do that, if I think it’s at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things. So, if they do that, if Europe does that, with a bad intention — if it’s a good intention, that’s fine — if it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.” This sounds a lot like the warning I gave some while back, that Trump’s America First policies were moving toward an America only policy. Trump has trashed our alliances. He has reneged on our treaties. He has threatened to leave NATO. He thinks the world cannot manage without America and now that it is trying, he appears to want to hasten that rupture.

Von der Leyen, meanwhile, told the European Parliament that as democracies confront a “fracture in the international rules-based system,” Brussels and Ottawa need to draw closer together. “This is a partnership not against anyone else, but for our common strength.” France’s Europe minister, Benjamin Haddad, added that Washington has no power to veto EU decisions: “It is not up to the United States, or anyone else, to choose the political and geopolitical direction of the Europeans.”

In other words: go pound sand.

Increasingly, the president talks as though he’s been handed divine authority over the rest of the world — Russia, China, and North Korea excepted. To his most devoted supporters, he has become something akin to a cult leader and they are drinking the Kool-Aid. To everyone else, he increasingly sounds like a man unraveling. His pseudo-populism — what I’d call neosocialism — has morphed into something closer to a collective pathology darker with emotional and seeming mental unwellness playing out on a global scale.

But what I find particularly sobering and damning is that Donald Trump is still preferable to almost anyone the current democrat party has to offer. Back in 2018, Paul Volcker warned us that the United States was descending into a plutocracy, suffering from a crisis of good governance. The former Fed chairman said that he feared the skill and reputation of the U.S. government had been corroded by self-interested elites shaping law through lobbying and campaign donations. He said “Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone. Even respect for the Federal Reserve. How can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?” Volcker then said the country was “in a hell of a mess in every

direction.” What would he say now with presidential approval ratings in the mid 30s, the Supreme Court in the low 30s and the Congress in the mid-teens?

Again, the Athenian sortition seems to be a great idea.