Anyone who might have over-imbibed while welcoming in the New Year should soon be sobered by learning of what President Donald Trump – a life-long teetotaler – has been up to since January 1. He has snatched the despotic leader of Venezuela and brought him back to the USA to face criminal charges, re-expressed his designs on Greenland, expressed his readiness to support protesters in Iran, and supported masked ICE officers after the shooting of a protester in Minnesota.
Perhaps more sobering is the thought that this time a year ago, a bloke called Joe Biden was President of the USA.
PoO’s realisation of the extent of change over the past 12 months has been sharpened by Jerry Coyne, on Why Evolution is True, who today has drawn attention to
- Trump’s narcissistic renaming mania;
- His readiness to deploy superior force to plunder the weak;
- And the one thing which he says can stop him – his own (deeply flawed) moral compass.
I don’t have the right credentials to get into the real reasons President Donald Trump adds his name to things. But he has a long business history of doing just that — notably buildings but also products and even a for-profit real estate seminar called Trump University.
Here in the D.C. area, he has a golf course in Virginia and had the Trump International Hotel, near the White House, during his first presidential term. The money-losing hotel changed hands (and names) after he left office.
Since moving back into the White House nearly a year ago, Trump has taken a more aggressive approach to putting his stamp on the city and, more broadly, the federal government.
- In December, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to rename the institution the Trump Kennedy Center. Then it literally added his name to the outside of the building.
- Also last month, the State Department added his name to a nearby building that housed a nonprofit organization he had attempted to dismantle. It’s now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
- A new class of Navy battleship is set to carry Trump’s name and perhaps some of his own design ideas.
- A government website launched last month for the Trump Gold Card. It was created as part of an expedited visa program, which would cost applicants $1 million after a $15,000 application fee.
- Another site, Trumprx.gov, is expected to go live this year. It’s part of Trump’s vision for the government to offer medicine — including weight-loss drugs — direct to consumer, at lower prices.
- There’s also the Trump accounts, an investment program for babies born during his second term. Each account would start with $1,000 and invest index funds.
- Giant banners featuring Trump’s name and face hang outside the U.S. Department of Agriculture (next to an Abraham Lincoln banner) and outside the Labor Department (next to a Theodore Roosevelt banner).
- If you buy a national parks pass for 2026, it has Trump’s portrait next to George Washington’s. Visitors have been warned against defacing the card. The National Park Service also added Trump’s birthday (which coincides with Flag Day) as a fee-free holiday, while removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth and National Public Lands Day from that list.
- The U.S. is minting commemorative coins as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration and may include a $1 Trump coin in the mix.
And we’re only one year into Trump’s term. I can’t figure out which is the worst—either the Trump coins (I don’t think a living President has ever been depicted on money) or making Trump’s birthday a free-free day at National Parks while deep-sixing Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Trump’s urge to plunder – of much greater concern to people around the world than his obsession with names – is highlighted in an article at the Weekly Dish. The author, Andrew Sullivan, calls the Trump administration’s foreign incursions examples of “A Viking foreign policy”, with the subtitle, “The logic of Trump’s entire approach: deploy superior force to plunder the weak. Repeat.”
It’s here that Coyne found this bothersome quote:
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” – Donald Trump, asked about any limits on his war powers.
Sullivan writes –
In one way, the last couple of weeks have been clarifying.
Ten years ago, I went back to Plato to try and understand Trump’s meteoric rise in our decadent polity. The essay remains unnervingly prescient in its portrayal of late-stage democracy’s yearning for tyranny, and more accurate about Trump’s second term than the first. But one key thing was always missing from seeing Trump as a tyrant in Plato’s schema. For Plato, tyrants always, always, always go to war. And yet, as I noted last year, in a piece that now seems a touch naive, Trump “lacks a core feature for every tyrant: he doesn’t seem interested in launching wars.”
Score another one for Plato, I guess. But his analysis doesn’t quite work. For Plato, the purpose of war for a tyrant is domestic control: “The first thing he will do, I imagine, is to be constantly stirring up some war or other, so that the people will need a leader.” But Trump doesn’t need a foreign enemy to rally support. He already has that enemy at home: leftists, illegal immigrants, trans people, Rosie O’Donnell, et al. His base hates the other half of America more than any foreign power.
Nonetheless, Plato’s psychological grasp of the tyrant still holds. The core drive is for disinhibited domination, and this is true of Trump. He is only comfortable if he controls everything and everyone in his domain. Equal co-existence without subordination is simply beyond his understanding — hence his sincere bafflement at the Constitution.
And the analogy:
In other words, Trump is a pagan. Two millennia of Christian ideas about war and peace, virtue and wisdom, individual dignity and morality, have passed him by entirely — which is why liberalism of any kind is incomprehensible to him. If you want to find the nearest analogy to his mindset, you have to reach back to a world where Christianity was entirely absent. The Vikings come to mind — resisting morality and Christianity up until the eleventh century. The 2022 movie, The Northman, was brilliant in its utterly unapologetic portrayal of this Viking mindset, with no moralizing at all. If you want to see the id of MAGA in full throttle, check it out.
The Vikings in their prime years had just recovered from a sixth and seventh century population collapse (climate change), followed by a period of widespread anarchy and warlordism that rendered any kind of civil society impossible. The warlordism that became endemic at home soon became warlordism abroad. The goal was relatively simple: use violence and the threat of violence to invade, murder, and plunder. The goal was lucre, which gave them more power to seek more lucre, which led to more glory. There was nothing in their worldview that would ever give them moral pause, even as Christian Europe was incubating the idea of moral restraints on state violence.
. . . In this Viking rubric, there’s no mystery why Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the president and his wife. He did it for the thrill of domination — man does he relish parading his enemies in a perp walk — but mainly for the lucre. He has told us this explicitly — shamelessness is one of his pagan virtues — long before and immediately after the fact. The idea that he is interested in Venezuelan democracy is ludicrous. He’s a mob boss — that’s all. And a protection racket has now descended over the entire Western Hemisphere, called the Donroe Doctrine. This is what America now is: a global Tony Soprano.
. . . . The only question remaining is a simple one. Who’s next? And how much is he gonna steal next time?
Coyne expressed his outrage while commenting:
“My own morality”???? What kind of morality is that? And on what grounds should it override the law, especially since Trump (twice) has taken oaths to defend the Constitution. The thought that Trump’s own morality is his only impediment is the scariest thing I’ve heard come out of his mouth. I really should take up knitting.”
While Trump has decoupled the United States from the rules-based international order, giving rise to a new international order based on the use of military force, our PM has been …
On holiday, we suppose.
The delicate task of clucking Kiwi concerns about the evisceration of rules-based global protocols and relationships was left to Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters.
Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.
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