Snapshot: The Deranged Escalation of Conflict
In a sane world, Trump's letter to Norway would be the final straw, convincing responsible leaders to invoke the 25th Amendment. Instead, we can expect more madness ahead.
Yesterday we were provided the latest evidence that Donald Trump is stark, raving mad. In a sane world, with a functioning democracy and a system of checks and balances, the vice president, the cabinet and Congress would be urgently pursuing the constitutional mechanism to remove a president who “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That’s the 25th Amendment, of course—and we can be sure that even the release of Trump’s deranged letter to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre will not motivate these traitorous sycophants to act.
Here’s part of that letter: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America…The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”
This deranged escalation of conflict with America’s once-steadfast European allies has rightly generated fear across Europe that these mad rantings could lead to an invasion of a sovereign territory, the destruction of the NATO alliance and war. Danes and Greenlanders have begun wearing MAGA-red baseball caps that say “Make America Go Away.”
In a sign of how untethered from reality members of Trump’s cabinet are, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC to support Trump’s Greenland push and assert this proudly: “The U.S. is back, and this is what U.S. leadership looks like.”
The unraveling of historic alliances and the international order—all for the purpose of Trump flaunting the military might of America, relishing land grabs and momentarily suppressing the fact of his physical and mental decline—looks like little more than scripting the wet dreams of Vladimir Putin. The increasing isolation of a rogue and power-mad America is unavoidable.
Tomorrow Trump will be addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where anxiety-riddled world leaders are gathering. We can be sure that his remarks will be no less mad than his letter insisting that he’s ready to go to war over Greenland because he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize. God help us.
One quick note: Later today I will share with you an essay from several years ago that not only underscores that the dangerous destruction of a second Trump term was predictable, so was the readiness of elected Republicans to applaud the damage if it would dismantle liberal government.
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I thought this was a brilliant statement from someone on another site:
“A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King."
For someone who is a draft dodger he certainly is fascinated with the military.