If renaming Gulfs, bullying innocents (like Canada or Greenland) and fantasizing about Alcatraz prison are Trump’s ‘genius’ shots at stunt distractions, either he ups his game or cements his ignominy.
Superior criminal operatives, corporate and otherwise, have flair and intelligence, even workable schemes, to overcome predictable resistance. Not all criminals are as dumb or divisive, thus vulnerable as Trump. True, Americans are fascinated with radically individualist scofflaws who scorn all the rules, whether nervy, “creative” Elon Musk types, ruthless mobsters like Al Capone, or a billionaire president who doubled his wealth (up $2.4 billion) after his first go-round.
But unfit, pretend, self-elected kings won’t win over their own authority-hating, go-it-alone base when they place larceny over MAGA payoffs. By devastating world trade, jacking up inflation and jeopardizing access to Christmas presents, while slashing big favorites like Medicaid, Medicare, plus health, housing, energy and food assistance, Trump needs the greatest entertainment bait-and-switch charade in human history – and that ain’t happening.
Au contraire, except for still-suckered MAGA types, the Trump entertainment travesty is so far a devastating failure: Trump’s transparent overreach, disdaining sacred principles like due process and habeas corpus, just looks crooked, petty and scheming, awarding neither (affordable) bread, nor distracting circuses. If Trump the reckless, blinkered gambler imagines Musk, Vance, Hegseth, Ludnick, and RFK, Jr. the right team for his charm offensive, he’s committing the greatest gaffe in American history.
The appalling Trump charm offensive is face-planting – reliant on creepy, off-putting, tin-ear clowns much better at offending than deflection. Add months of credibility erosion to Trump’s off-putting, worn-out, shock jock ploys (that never appealed to wary centrists), and the totality of Trump deplorables weaken take-over presumptions.
Compared to far more dominant strongmen (Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Xi, Netanyahu – all “monsters’ to R. Reich), Trump and his cabinet already appear irretrievably over their heads, staggered by the audacity of their collective dead ends. What brilliant adviser (oh, the genius at the top) thought so many misfires would work: 1) rushed, boomeranging, global tariff disruptions, plus 2) very bad, very unpopular jokes (renaming Gulfs, seizing Canada or Greenland, restoring Alcatraz), plus 3) blaming all downsides to China, the bygone Biden, or weak-kneed Democrats. All fail any rational smell test.
Successful autocrats understand real-world dynamics, so badly dismissed by Trump (senile or not). Again, he’s running, I mean ruining, his own show, again, his own worst enemy. “Let Trump implode” is a weak Dem default, but nothing can halt the speed and stupidity of piling on unfixable blunders. The unflashy Biden didn’t alone wallop the discredited Trump.
Tyranny game no pushover
Except when totaling the reckless, heedless demolition, Trump’s non-stop “flooding the zone” lurches ahead without focus or justification – certainly not minimum defense of its speed and range. Why has the thin-skinned, rhetoric-spewing, highly defensive king of chaos made so little attempts to explain, let alone vindicate, his epic scattergun? “The world is corrupt, always victimizing poor America” falls far short. Why start a horrendous global tariff ambush without having any good escapes? The outcomes will only humiliate Trump, exposing his utter ignorance of trade dynamics or how to restore domestic manufacturing (instead, frightening CEOs now resisting huge capital outlays).
The whole charade parallels a one-man band noisily marching down Main St. to distract from the ongoing thievery around the corner. That covers crypto, meme-coins, hotel expansions in Europe and the Middle-East, outright bribery (the deluxe $400 million gift airplane from Qatar), and the corporate blackmail underway as donors and CEOs beg for exclusions, pay-to-play federal subsidies, tax favoritism, and reduced agency clout, thus less regulation.
Thus impoverished, average folks losing massive social and economic support can’t match the funding and leverage demanded by centralized, strongman domination. What’s missing, aside from compassion and understanding what good government should do, is the standard Trump populist malarky that got him elected. Convinced of never needing another election, Trump, Inc.’s brew of shameless, elitist profiteering no longer needs anything but a smokescreen of symbolic, culture war coverups. Little people live in misery while fat cats luxuriate, wetting their lips over promised tax cuts.
The onslaught of endless, concentrated disgraces makes many wonder how long the irreplaceable-to-MAGA Trump can effectively wield power. Will this stumbling oldster fall to medical unfitness, the cacophony of gross negligence, ever greater stupidities, or more propaganda calamities, so predictably tiresome his unpopularity will increase? In rushing to destroy what he doesn’t understand, like a toddler in a tantrum, I can’t imagine Trump not being crippled long before the GOP loses the House. The erratically-sentient clown, with clear attention deficit disorders from senility or bad faith, continues to test how long America tolerates having a failed lord of misrule at the helm.
Okay, now any grifter can be president
Remember the joke that “anyone can be president,” but that frivolity is replaced by what happens when the government is headed by a greedy fool enabled by the least qualified cranks and crackpots ever handed power – and all so Trump can fire them. Mass firings would reinforce his domination fantasies, plus providing armies to blame, then scapegoat as if Biden clones. Picking boobs way out of their depth provides ready, if duplicitous escape hatches –- but only for fools too dumb to get the con. Aside from undeniable, notorious bitcoin-style corruption, the cult is running out of shiny objects.
The stumbling president who boasts of flawlessness, still deemed perfect by Trump fanatics, is quite the opposite – and all the contradictions and vulnerabilities present in 2015 are doubling-down with ferocious force. Perhaps a superior dictator wannabe, as smart as the arrogant Trump thinks himself, could pull off what was anything but a slam dunk. But judging by the first 100 days, as Newtonian laws specify, for every action (gruesome government demolition), there’s an equal and opposite reaction, bloodying the Trump brand. Even the very best autocrats could not pull themselves out of the multiple holes – political, legal, economic, trade quandaries, naked corruption – that the Doofus-in-chief has dug for himself, on his own, without external pressure. On display is bullheadedness mixed with ignorance and power-hungry narcissism.
By 2028, let alone 2026, such conclusions may already be old news. If nothing much changes (and how could it?), we can project what informs Trump’s legacy, aside from confirmation as national laughing stock. Will it be willful stupidity, misguided, counterproductive retribution attempts, blundering failures to remake America and the world, corruption so sweeping as to leave observers speechless? A regime of lawless vengeance with only one star will disintegrate when that star is judged not only as a defective president but defective, overreaching dictator-for-a-day. So far, this wizard can’t even stage-manage his own fabricated sideshows well enough to distract from the main circus ring of theft. Indeed, what CNN’s headline concludes about the Gulf of Mexico fiasco fits the entire Trump regime so far, ‘It has gone horribly!’ CNN data analyst trashes Trump ‘Gulf of America’ rebrand.
P.S. Directly protecting family grift, the latest being two billion dollars from Abu Dhabi in a corrupt Trump family crypto scheme, here’s an apt headline, “Trump’s justice department to disband unit investigating crypto fraud.” What a perfect scam: disband the agency that monitors cryptocurrency fraud so that Trumpers maximize leverage and profits, with unmonitored pumping and dumping across the suspect crypto corridor. For Paul Krugman, such moves have the “stench of Trumpist corruption,” what “amounts to brazen bribery,” putting the presidency up “for sale, and the buyers appear to include not just wealthy foreigners but foreign governments.” While meme coins start as jokes, “some gain traction thanks to viral attention and community support — reaching massive market caps in the process.”
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