A Trump L’Oeil and More Signs of What’s to Come

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

Positive, Harris actually had no selection however to certify her opponent’s win. However since she wasn’t unsuitable 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 end result had been totally different, and if Harris had gained, does anybody consider that Trump would have gracefully accepted his defeat? Does anybody consider 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 consider the GOP-led Congress wouldn’t have carried out every little thing 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 photos 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, first rate, but, finally, 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 persons are useless, 1000’s have been left homeless, tens of 1000’s have been evacuated, and most of the most stunning 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 bunch 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 towards legal professionals and judges and elected officers who tried to carry Trump accountable for his misdeeds during the last 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 said that particular counsel Jack Smith should be exiled from the USA.) And he’s referred to as for New York decide Juan Merchan, who presided over his hush-money trial, to be “disbarred.” Trump has, additionally this week, promised to fire 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 repeatedly 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 prices, he was going to impose no penalties within the hush-money case. Days later, the shameless judge 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 costs 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 navy on home protesters and on would-be asylum seekers, in addition to to make use of the complete would possibly of the Justice Division to launch a collection of present trials that will look proper at dwelling in totalitarian mid-century Europe. And he has carried out 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 principally dispense with any efforts to rein in far-right propaganda, and showering Trump with donations to his inauguration festivities, as did Apple CEO Tim Cook 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 get together 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 a way the USA intends to work together with its closest allies. In reality, so outrageous and contemptible is Musk’s habits that senior political figures in the UK have referred to as on Starmer to demand a gathering with the US ambassador to precise the nation’s displeasure on the tycoon’s meddling within the UK’s inside politics.

Rounding out the shit present, Trump held a press conference on Tuesday by which he threatened battle and financial break towards Panama, Denmark, and Canada (the latter two each NATO allies, and presumably in a position to set off NATO’s Article 5 had been the US to assault them) except 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.” Effectively performed.

Why would Donald Trump need the large, icy, expanse of Greenland (inhabitants 56,000)? In all probability as a result of, regardless of his local weather denialism, he is aware of that in a warming world, Greenland’s enormous reserves of rare earth elements, reminiscent of yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and dysprosium will grow to be more and more accessible over the approaching many years, and more and more necessary 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 number of the world’s largest unexploited oil and natural gas deposits. Furthermore, because the Arctic waters soften, it’ll finally management an important 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 dad and mom), 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 stress between the West towards 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, which means it’s an asset America ought to seize.

On myriad fronts, Trump’s America First coverage is taking form. If anybody severely thought model two of his presidency could be about bringing down the value of eggs and pressuring the feds to decrease rates of interest, they’ve bought 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.

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

We’d do effectively to take him at his phrase this time round, as all of us ought to have carried out eight years in the past. Again then, many commentators assured these of us who had been genuinely horrified at what Trump’s presidency portended that his guarantees had been merely bluster. Then he bought elected and did precisely what he stated he’d do: implement a Muslim journey ban, separate households on the border, minimize 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 a substitute of blathering on about how acquiescence and cooperation is nice for democracy, should provide some principled, fiery, phrases of opposition to this more and more megalomaniacal agenda. It should solely worsen from right here, and the world wants a principled opposition to be in place in the USA.