Trump will have what Vlad and Kim are having
Remember the Trumpish bluster last year about Canada as the 51st state? And about Donald Trump acquiring Greenland from Denmark by hook or crook? After Trump’s toppling of the Venezuelan government, one might want to understand the reichsmarschall’s wife’s post above as more than trolling. It’s a threat against NATO member Denmark.
What we have before us is an addled president in failing health surrounded by a coterie of advisers eager to turn the U.S. into a hemispheric hegemon. At least until the music stops and Trump drops dead.
Reporters asked Trump to comment on the difference in treatment between former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump pardoned for drug crimes, and President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, militarily overthrown by U.S. forces over alleged drug crimes. Trump answered with a third-person non sequitur reflective of his desire to pursue “a highly personalized geopolitics,” writes Jonah E. Bromwich of The New York Times:
“The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”
Both Hernández and Maduro cases wound up before the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors asked that Hernández be allowed to die in jail for “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Instead, Trump pardoned him.
“Trump thinks he can use federal criminal prosecutions for any purpose, which is to say to promote his foreign policy views, to promote his vendettas, to promote his self-interest and to promote his perceived political interests,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York.
The Supreme Court gave Trump carte blanche as president to commit crimes. And so he has. Americans gave the felon and wannabe dictator another term to trample the Constitution. And so he has. American justice now is what Donald Trump says it is. So is American foreign adventurism.
Will Saletan writes at The Bulwark that Trump has already telegraphed his next colonialist moves. They are predicated on fighting drug trafficking for now. Later he’ll find justification for wherever his imperialist whims take him. As some day it may happen that a victim reason must be found, he’s got a little list.
Columbia: President Gustavo Petro had better “watch his ass,” says Trump.
Cuba: Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit.”
Mexico: “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.”
Canada: Drugs that enter the U.S. through Canada “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
You get the idea. On his list of prospective Trump victims, Saletan includes practically all the Americas plus Iran and Greenland. On the latter, Saletan includes:
At the press conference, Trump said regime change in Venezuela was part of “our new national security strategy” to counter “growing security threats in the Western Hemisphere.” That sounds like what he said two weeks ago when he announced the appointment of an envoy to acquire Greenland. “We need Greenland for national security,” he declared at that time. “We have to have it.”
I am reluctant to reach the easy conclusion many have that Trump invaded Venezuela for oil. Or as a distraction from the Epstein files. It is a fool’s errand to explain irrational behavior like kleptomania or hoarding via rational thinking. It is akin to a category error. That’s not to say oil or distraction were not factors. Nothing Republicans like better than a twofer unless it’s a threefer. Mere riches are for losers. Trump wants to be a one-man, hemispheric hegemon.
Remember how ignorant and backward-looking Trump is. The man’s cognitive development stalled sometime in the late 1970s. He considers himself the world’s premiere expert on topics based on the thinnest gloss of knowledge or on what he heard during a recent conversation.
Trump opposes electromagnetic catapults on aircraft carriers. Steam is better. Why? He uses steam boilers to heat his NY buildings. Nobody knows steam like Donald.
Trump doesn’t grasp Greenland’s size distortion in a Mercator projection. Marvel’s Peter Quill thinks of himself as Star-Lord. James “Rhodey” Rhodes on first observing Quill famously says, “So he’s an idiot.” As is Trump. He patterned himself after mob bosses. He now imagines himself a strongman in the mold of Vladmir Putin or Kim Jong Un. His attempts to emulate them, while highly destructive, are pathetic.
What seem like logical and obvious motivators to rational people may not operate the same way in Trump’s head. Windmills don’t work. Coal is clean. Perhaps being stuck in the age of oil embargoes makes snatching Venezuela’s oil attractive despite the U.S. not needing it. He’s not doing things because he needs a distraction from the Epstein files. As Digby wrote, He’s doing this stuff because he wants to do it!
Trump discovered as president that power was a stronger aphrodisiac than money. Putin became impossibly rich as the gangster-president of Russia. But riches are not why he’s invaded Ukraine; he wants to rule a restored Russian Empire. Trump the Pathologically Insecure is still desperate to join an international autocrats club that wouldn’t have an idiot like him as a member. Perhaps he believes creating a police state and some gunboat diplomacy finally will gain him admission. He’s seen how feared and powerful his crushes are and says, “I’ll have what they’re having.”