Back in June of last year as I was still high on the hopium of dispatching Donald Trump and his MAGA cult once and for all, I recall reading a piece by Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley in Rolling Stone with the provocative headline “Trump’s Not ‘Bluffing’: Inside the MAGA Efforts To Make a Second Term Even More Extreme.” I read it with interest but it sounded crazy. They quoted a bunch of Trump insiders saying things like “Yes, we do really want to burn it all down” and when asked about potential court challenges they replied, “Who cares?”
I didn’t take it totally seriously at the time. Trumpers are often blowhards just like their boss and at the time, I confess I didn’t believe that America would restore Trump to the White House after what he did on January 6th, the stolen classified documents and the felony convictions. Why would people want to buy that mess again?
Well, they bought it and I don’t know about you but it’s actually been worse than I anticipated. Even having read that article and many others about what he had in mind, the fact that “guardrails” would be completely torn down and he would be hiring nothing but ruthless henchmen to carry out his whims and wishes I was still unprepared for his reckless lack of restraint in ways that were never discussed prior to his winning the election.
Sure we knew that he was going to enact the Project 2025 blueprint and appoint a bunch of MAGA extremists to the cabinet. I don’t think we thought he’d stoop so low as to choose someone as unqualified as Pete Hegseth for the important job of Defense Secretary or RFK Jr for Health and Human Services but we probably should have known he’d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to ensure the extreme loyalty he required. And I think we were all aware that he was going to use all the power at his disposal to exact revenge on his political enemies. (I did expect to see more resistance from the powerful institutions he’s targeted.)
The deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants is about what I expected although the sickening spectacle they are making of it is even more grotesque than I thought it would be. DHS Secretary Noem is showing a previously untapped theatrical talent, with more frequent costume changes than Beyonce on tour. I didn’t expect the expulsion of foreign students and scientists who have expressed views the government does not like, however, especially the use of creepy masked secret police to haul them off the streets with no notice and throwing them into distant detention camps.
And yes, we knew he would foul up the economy with his obsession for tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the English language” and nobody even thought it was weird. I suspect that most people assumed that he would simply do what he did in the first term and make a big show of it without actually killing the golden goose of a good economy. It appears that was far too optimistic. He’s planning what he’s oddly called “liberation day” on April 2nd when he says he’s going to throw a bunch of tariffs on everyone although even his closest economic advisers say that he’s deciding minute by minute what he’s going to do.
But for all the outrages we’ve seen in these first couple of months, and there are so many, Trump has come up with a few that are so beyond the pale that you have to start questioning his sanity — and the sanity of those who are enabling him. But when you consider everything he’s actually doing I think you have to take him seriously.
For instance, I guess we knew that he had mentioned buying Greenland during his first term, (or exchanging it for Puerto Rico) after someone one had told him that Denmark was having trouble supporting the island and he thought it could be an acquisition like Alaska. (Trump’s folly?) Nobody thought much of it but now it’s quite clear that he actually means to do it, as if territorial expansion is a perfectly normal thing in the 21st century.
And then there’s the crazy feud with Canada which seems to stem from the same impulse as the Greenland obsession. Trump looks at a map and thinks he can consolidate all of North America into the United States, perhaps even change the name to Trumplandia for all we know.
This map is what gets him excited.
Consider that incredibly bizarre meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at which he publicly floated the idea of forced relocation of the Palestinians to other countries where they would be provided with nice houses and the U.S. would take over Gaza and turn it into an international resort. He hasn’t mentioned it recently so maybe someone finally explained to him that it would be better to put that idea on the back burner, but he was quite serious about it when he said it.
Trump has always been a narcissist but it has now become full blown megalomania. These are peculiar, radical, extreme ideas far outside even the MAGA mainstream, that are nonetheless being taken very seriously by people in his orbit and around the world. JD Vance, the alleged true blue MAGA America Firster, went to Greenland on Friday and basically proclaimed it to be American territory.
I don’t know if any of this will or can happen but considering how many of his proposals that we previously thought were completely mad are actually being implemented I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss the latest daft idea that he can run for a third term.
I know that his former adviser the influencer Steve Bannon has been floating that for a while, largely based upon some very fringe ideas from an activist lawyer named Mike Davis. The vast consensus is that it’s impossible because the Constitution clearly forbids it. But when asked by Kristen Welker in a phone interview on Sunday if he was joking when he said that he might run for a third term he said no. He said that he is so popular, more popular than any president in history — in the high 70 percent — that it might make sense. (The highest approval rating he has gotten so far is 50%)
He said:
Well, there are plans. There are — not plans. There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.
She asked if he was talking about the idea that JD Vance could run for president with him as vice president and then hand it back to him on the day after the inauguration and he replied, “Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others.”
I have no idea what those plans might be but it is true that there has been talk that the Vance hand-off might actually be doable under a certain reading of the constitution.
Do I think it’s probable? Not likely. He’ll be 82 in 2028 and he’s already losing a whole lot of steps. Even saying “there are plans” out loud is a sign of instability. But the way things are going I think it would be a huge mistake for the opposition to just ignore this talk. These people have an extreme, autocratic, authoritarian agenda and we are seeing it unfold in real time before our eyes. Literally nothing is impossible.
Salon
