We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
I’ve written that this is all about world domination for him and got quite a bit of blowback. TDS to the max, I’m told. No, he’s just a crazy old man (which he is) not some world historical villain. He just said it. He believes he runs the world.
He doesn’t, of course. He barely runs the White House. But he has a tremendous amount of power to destroy things and he’s doing it:
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
That’s from a feature about Trump’s comeback in the Atlantic. Here’s a gift link if you want to read it. Gird yourself. It’s very disturbing.
This piece by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic defines this well:
When we think of the word fascism, everyone’s mind races immediately to Adolf Hitler. But the world has seen many variants of fascism, Nazism being only one. There’s Italian fascismo, there’s Francoism, there’s Banderism (that was Ukrainian) and Ilminism (South Korean) and more. There’s neofascism and crypto-fascism and ur-fascism and Islamofascism. But Donald Trump has given us something new: clown-show fascism.
Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity. The first characteristic certainly applies to the Trump administration, and it’s chilling and frightening and not at all funny. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil.
Yet at the same time, in other areas, the incompetence has been staggering. Trump’s constant about-faces and walk backs on tariffs have been an international embarrassment. Elon Musk’s DOGE has fired federal workers willy-nilly only to turn around and rehire many after the Musketeers realized they weren’t deep-state bloodsuckers and the work they did was kind of essential, after all—you know, like the people who tend the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
And then there’s the tariff scheme which is the biggest example of staggeringly incompetent clown show fascism yet. That one hasn’t even begun to bite.
Trump thinks he runs the world and could intimidate every other country into bending to his will. That’s not working out the way he planned it.