A Trump L’Oeil and Extra Indicators of What’s to Come

This has not been an excellent week. First, there was the totally devastating spectacle of Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral Faculty win. 4 years since Trump triggered an riot in a determined try to cling to energy, Harris referred to as Monday’s outcome a “good day” for democracy. No matter else it was, it wasn’t an excellent day.

Certain, Harris actually had no alternative however to certify her opponent’s win. However since she wasn’t fallacious when she recognized Trump as a fascist within the final weeks of the 2024 marketing campaign, Monday was not a day for celebration. In any case, if the outcome had been completely different, and if Harris had gained, does anybody imagine that Trump would have gracefully accepted his defeat? Does anybody imagine his odious armed mob—a few of whom have spent the previous 4 years intimidating elections officers and threatening to rain loss of life and destruction on his political opponents—wouldn’t have taken to the streets and tried to storm the Capitol once more? Does anybody actually imagine the GOP-led Congress wouldn’t have executed all the pieces in its energy to disrupt proceedings?

However for the Democrats, wedded to course of in a system their opponents have spent years hollowing out and plotting finish runs round, all that mattered was that they confirmed decorum. It conjured up pictures of the well-mannered upper-crust passengers on the Titanic listening to chamber music carried out by on-board musicians determined to maintain the passengers calm because the ship started to flounder: honorable, respectable, but, in the end, totally futile.

Then, wildfires fueled by 100 mph winds and worsened by a paucity of rainfall exploded in Los Angeles. As I write this column, on Thursday night, not less than 10 individuals are useless, hundreds have been left homeless, tens of hundreds have been evacuated, and lots of the most lovely coastal properties in LA have been diminished to piles of ash. Over the course of my lifetime, I will need to have pushed across the Pacific Palisades space a whole lot of instances. The great thing about the panorama as Sundown Boulevard descends to the Pacific Ocean has been transmogrified, in a single day, right into a vista of apocalyptic devastation. It’s catastrophic.

Once more, this actually hasn’t been a high quality week.

Add into that the rising drumbeat of threats in opposition to attorneys and judges and elected officers who tried to carry Trump accountable for his misdeeds over the past 4 years. Up to now week, Trump has referred to as for the political figures concerned in congressional hearings into the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to be incarcerated. (He beforehand acknowledged that particular counsel Jack Smith ought to be exiled from the USA.) And he’s referred to as for New York choose Juan Merchan, who presided over his hush-money trial, to be “disbarred.” Trump has, additionally this week, promised to fireside the Nationwide Archives figures who reported his taking of labeled paperwork to the Justice Division.

And, removed from anybody holding him to account, he’s being rewarded many times and once more for his vile rhetoric and actions. This week, Merchan made it clear that regardless of a jury’s having discovered Trump responsible on greater than 30 expenses, he was going to impose no penalties within the hush-money case. Days later, the shameless choose Aileen Cannon, serving now extra as a shill than a judicial determine, blocked the discharge of Smith’s report into the proof that led to the fees within the secret paperwork case.

In the meantime, as Trump rounds out his interior circle, the incoming president’s henchmen are itching to unleash the US army on home protesters and on would-be asylum seekers, in addition to to make use of the total would possibly of the Justice Division to launch a collection of present trials that may look proper at residence in totalitarian mid-century Europe. And he has executed so in a media surroundings the place tech tycoons like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are lining as much as kiss the ring, by recalibrating fact-checking guidelines in order to mainly dispense with any efforts to rein in far-right propaganda, and showering Trump with donations to his inauguration festivities, as did Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner, becoming a member of Zuckerberg and others.

On the similar time, Elon Musk, the proprietor of X and unelected-president-in-the-wings, has gone full-blown fascist. After calling for the Germans to elect the neo-Nazi AfD occasion to energy in December, he declared that the Brits ought to imprison Prime Minister Starmer, free from jail far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and invite America in to “liberate” them from their very own elected authorities. It’s not precisely business-as-usual for the way the USA intends to work together with its closest allies. In actual fact, so outrageous and contemptible is Musk’s habits that senior political figures within the UK have referred to as on Starmer to demand a gathering with the US ambassador to specific the nation’s displeasure on the tycoon’s meddling within the UK’s inner politics.

Rounding out the shit present, Trump held a press convention on Tuesday through which he threatened warfare and financial break in opposition to Panama, Denmark, and Canada (the latter two each NATO allies, and presumably in a position to set off NATO’s Article 5 have been the US to assault them) until they instantly roll over and cede territory and sovereignty to sate Trump’s more and more megalomaniacal calls for. Nearly as an afterthought, he promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” to which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded by proposing that North America be renamed “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America.” Properly performed.

Why would Donald Trump need the large, icy, expanse of Greenland (inhabitants 56,000)? Most likely as a result of, regardless of his local weather denialism, he is aware of that in a warming world, Greenland’s big reserves of uncommon earth parts, resembling yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and dysprosium will turn into more and more accessible over the approaching a long time, and more and more essential geostrategic property given the world’s reliance on cell telephones, computer systems, batteries, and different merchandise that incorporate these parts. It additionally has the world’s sixth-largest deposit of uranium, which Greenland’s authorities has banned from being mined, however which nuclear powers would clearly covet. The Arctic area has, as well as, a few of the world’s largest unexploited oil and pure fuel deposits. Furthermore, because the Arctic waters soften, it can ultimately management a significant transport channel for world sea commerce—making Trump’s rationale for seizing the huge island not dissimilar to that of Britain’s grand imperialists in securing Singapore, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands in bygone instances.

As my previous good friend Anders Krab-Johansen (born in Greenland to Danish mother and father), CEO and writer of the Danish media firm Berlingske Media, defined to me, “Greenland is of main strategic significance to Denmark, the US, and Europe in a world with world pressure between the West in opposition to China and Russia. Greenland has uncommon minerals and is essential to Arctic buying and selling routes.”

In Trump’s might-is-right view of the world, meaning it’s an asset America ought to seize.

On myriad fronts, Trump’s America First coverage is taking form. If anybody significantly thought model two of his presidency can be about bringing down the worth of eggs and pressuring the feds to decrease rates of interest, they’ve received one other factor coming. All of that financial populist marketing campaign blather was, to tweak a phrase, a Trump l’oeil, an optical phantasm hiding the actual intent inside.

Certain, he’ll strain the feds on rates of interest, and he would possibly even achieve getting egg costs down, however that can be a sideshow. The actual story is shaping as much as be a brutal home and worldwide energy seize.

We might do effectively to take him at his phrase this time round, as all of us ought to have executed eight years in the past. Again then, many commentators assured these of us who have been genuinely horrified at what Trump’s presidency portended that his guarantees have been merely bluster. Then he received elected and did precisely what he mentioned he’d do: implement a Muslim journey ban, separate households on the border, lower immigrants off from quite a few types of public help, and so forth. This time round, he’s promising an America First coverage that threatens to destroy century-old alliances and remake America as a nakedly imperialist Nice Energy, demanding Lebensraum and obeisance on all sides.

The Democrats, as an alternative of blathering on about how acquiescence and cooperation is sweet for democracy, should supply some principled, fiery, phrases of opposition to this more and more megalomaniacal agenda. It can solely worsen from right here, and the world wants a principled opposition to be in place in the USA.