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

It wasn’t a very good week. First, there was the utterly devastating sight of Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory. Four years after Trump sparked an uprising in a desperate bid to cling to power, Harris called Monday’s results “good day“for democracy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good day.

Of course, Harris really had no choice but to witness her opponent’s victory. But since she was not wrong when she identified Trump a fascist in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Monday was not a day to celebrate. After all, if the outcome had been different and if Harris had won, does anyone believe that Trump would have graciously accepted his defeat? Does anyone believe that his odious armed mob — some of whom have spent the last four years intimidating election officials and threatening death and destruction to shower his political opponents — wouldn’t take to the streets and try to storm the Capitol again? Does anyone really believe that a GOP-led Congress wouldn’t do everything in its power to derail the process?

But for Democrats, wedded to the process in a system their opponents have spent years gutting and plotting eventual runoffs, all that mattered was that they show decency. It conjured up images of the well-behaved passengers on the upper deck of the Titanic listening to chamber music played by the ship’s musicians, desperately trying to keep the passengers calm as the ship began to rock: honourable, decent, but ultimately utterly futile.

Then wildfires broke out in Los Angeles, fueled by 100 mph winds and exacerbated by a lack of rainfall. As I write this column, at least 10 people have died, thousands have been left homeless, tens of thousands have been evacuated and many of Los Angeles’ most beautiful waterfront properties have been reduced to piles of ash as of Thursday evening. I must have driven around the Pacific Palisades area hundreds of times in my life. The beauty of the landscape as Sunset Boulevard descends to the Pacific Ocean was transformed overnight into a spectacle of apocalyptic devastation. This is disastrous.

Again, this week really wasn’t high quality.

Add to that the growing drumbeat of threats against lawyers, judges and elected officials who have tried to hold Trump accountable for his misdeeds over the past four years. Last week, Trump called out politicians who participated in congressional hearings on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. to be imprisoned. (He previously stated that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith must be exiled from the United States.) And he urged that New York Judge Juan Mercant, who presided over his hush money trial, be “stripped of rank.” Trump is also this week promised to fire figures from the National Archives, which reported that he had taken classified documents to the Department of Justice.

And no one is holding him accountable, he gets rewarded over and over and over again for his vile rhetoric and actions. Merchan made it clear this week that even though a jury found Trump guilty on more than 30 counts, he was going to do not impose fines in case of withholding money. After a few days, shameless judge Eileen Cannonserving now more as a trickster than a judicial figure, blocked the publication of Smith’s report as evidence that led to the charges in the classified documents case.

Meanwhile, as Trump finalizes his inner circle, the president-elect’s associates are eager to deploy the US military on domestic protesters and potential asylum seekers, and use the full might of the Justice Department to launch a series of show trials that would look right at home in mid-century totalitarian Europe. . And he’s done it in a media environment where tech moguls like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are lining up to kiss the ring, retooling fact-checking rules to largely abandon any attempt to curb far-right propaganda, and showering Trump with donations at his celebrations inauguration, as did Apple CEO Tim Cook, joining Zuckerberg and others.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, X’s owner and unelected president, has become a full-on fascist. Calling on Germans to elect the neo-Nazi AfD party to power in December, he said Britons should impeach Prime Minister Starmer, release far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson from prison and invite America to “liberate” them from their own elected government. This is not exactly business as usual for how the United States intends to engage with its closest allies. In fact, Musk’s behavior is so outrageous and despicable senior political figures of Great Britain urged Starmer to demand a meeting with the US ambassador to express the country’s displeasure with the tycoon’s interference in UK domestic politics.

Concluding the shit show, Trump held press conference on Tuesday, in which he threatened war and economic devastation to Panama, Denmark and Canada (the latter both NATO allies and presumably capable of triggering NATO Article 5 if the US attacked them) unless they immediately renounce and cede territory and sovereignty to meet Trump’s increasingly maniacal demands. Almost as an afterthought, he promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of the Americas,” to which Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum responded by proposing that North America be renamed “Mexican America”, or “Mexican America”. Well played.

Why does Donald Trump need the huge ice Greenland (population 56,000)? Probably because, despite his climate denialism, he knows that in a warming world Greenland has huge reserves rare earth elementssuch as yttrium, scandium, neodymium and dysprosium will become increasingly available over the coming decades and are increasingly important geostrategic assets given the world’s dependence on cell phones, computers, batteries and other products that include these elements. He also has the sixth largest uranium deposit in the worldwhich the Greenland government has banned from mining, but which the nuclear powers clearly want. The Arctic region also has some of the world’s largest undeveloped areas oil and natural gas fields. Moreover, if the Arctic waters melt, they will eventually control a vital shipping channel for global maritime trade, making Trump’s rationale for seizing the huge island no different from that of Great Britain’s imperialists in securing Singapore, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands in the former times.

As my old friend Anders Krab-Johansen (born in Greenland to Danish parents), CEO and publisher of the Danish media company Berlingske Media, explained to me, “Greenland is of great strategic importance to Denmark, the US and Europe in the world. with global tensions between the West against China and Russia. Greenland has rare minerals and is the key to Arctic trade routes.’

In Trump’s view of the world, that means these are assets America should seize.

Trump’s “America First” policy is taking shape on countless fronts. If anyone seriously thought the second version of his presidency was going to be all about lowering egg prices and pressuring the Feds to lower interest rates, they’re on to something else. All this economic populist campaign chatter was, so to speak, Trump l’oeil, an optical illusion that hid the real intentions.

Sure, he’ll put pressure on the Feds on interest rates, and he may even be able to lower egg prices, but that will be a sideshow. The real story looks like a brutal domestic and international power grab.

We would do well to take his word for it this time, as we all should have done eight years ago. At the time, many commentators assured those of us who were genuinely horrified by what a Trump presidency portended that his promises were mere bluster. Then he got elected and did exactly what he promised to do: he imposed a Muslim travel ban, separated families at the border, stripped immigrants of various forms of government assistance, and so on. This time he is promising an “America First” policy that threatens to destroy age-old alliances and turn America into an openly imperialist Great Power. demanding Habitat and obeisances from all sides.

Democrats, instead of babbling about how tacit consent and cooperation are good for democracy, should offer some principled, fiery words of opposition to this increasingly maniacal agenda. It will only get worse from here, and the world needs principled opposition from the United States.