The (Mentally) Sick Man of North America

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

The madman was very angry on Tuesday.

    There he stood behind an old Trump-Vance podium (I guess the Office of the President-elect placards haven't arrived from DC) rambling about all sorts of the usual weird shit flowing out of his circus clown car of a brain, only more of it. There are only two genders. Windmills make whales crazy. Yawn.

    Trump's insane press conference at his tacky Mar a Lago country club (the place where fake gold moulding goes to die) showcased his toxic, inexhaustible wellspring of anger and wingnuttery. The anger is inexplicable. Ever since Trump "won" two months ago (with lots of help from Elon Musk, who'd originally wanted to hitch his Space X rocket to Ron DeSantis), he and his supporters have been ejaculating rage and bile all over the American landscape. It's a curious, unjustified admixture of anger, arrogance and grievance.

   They've gotten everything they ever wanted and more. World leaders, political figures and the reliably worthless mainstream media are all giving Trump and his billionaire minions obeyance in advance. Nations abroad are adjusting their economic and military postures to adjust to Trump's incoming Fourth Reich.

    Let's take his strange obsession with the Panama Canal:

    “I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something," Trump said. “The Panama Canal is vital to our country.”

      Perhaps one reason for Trump's mad-on regarding the Panama Canal has to do with the fact that it was just one tentacle in his decades-long global criminal enterprise. Back in November 2017, Newsweek wrote an article about Trump's Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower. It was infamous for drug and human trafficking not to mention money laundering of Russian mob money. One of the paragraphs in the article said,

     "One of the men involved in the scheme was David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán, who a U.S. court subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison for laundering millions of dollars. Another was Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, who sold units at the Trump Ocean Club and later admitted that some of the people he did business with were members of the Russian mafia."

 

    Like Nancy Pelosi said to Trump in the Cabinet Room during his first "presidency", "With you, all roads lead to Putin."

     The Panamanian gravy train stopped (and Newsweek inexplicably didn't mention this) when new owners came in and kicked out Trump, his criminal buddies (throwing some of them in jail) and wasted no time in taking his name off the hotel. Keep in mind that for decades Panama had enjoyed a dubious reputation for being a stereotypical banana republic but Trump's criminal syndicate was so over the top it disgusted even Panama.

 Trump's Nuuk-ular Option

 

Another baffling obsession of Trump's is acquiring Greenland. While Trump was holding court in his gaudy mansion in Palm Beach, he'd dispatched his namesake to Nuuk, Greenland's capital. Donnie Jr was accompanied by Charlie Kirk, the ultimate Trump hangeron. Donnie was gone less than 24 hours later, which makes one wonder why he took Trump Force One to the world's largest island, in the first place.

    Years ago, when Trump first floated the idea of acquiring Greenland and making it a state or US territory, he did it so to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. Greenland and Denmark, of course, had no more interest in Puerto Rico than Trump was in helping them with federal aid after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria.

     I stand on pretty firm ground when I say that in New York City in the 70s, there was a virulent prejudice against Puerto Rico and its residents. It didn't matter to people like Trump that Puerto Rico was then as well as now a US territory and that all its residents were US citizens. Trump was very much a product of post-war Queens and the other four boroughs and his festering hatred for all things Puerto Rican was very much a part of his upbringing.

     When Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, it killed well over 3000 people, 2975 of whom were in Puerto Rico. The 911-class death toll had absolutely no effect on Trump the sociopath and he reluctantly gave Puerto Rico the federal aid they desperately needed. Trump's rationale (and one is or should be amazed that this came from a guy who would be indicted and convicted on 34 counts of fraud and ran a criminal operation in Panama that had netted him $75,000,000) was that Puerto Rico was corrupt and that they'd waste the federal aid.

    To those who know anything about Trump's unbroken history of racism, it was obvious that he wanted to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland so he could make America white again. Maybe he learned on Wikipedia that Greenland was owned by Denmark, a Scandinavian nation, and that he could trade brown people for proper white Nordic types.

   But the plain fact is, trading Greenland for Puerto Rico would not advance the Kingdom of Denmark's interests one bit. Plus, it's obviously been lost on Trump that nearly 90% of Greenland's population is Inuit and just 7.5 % of the population is actually Danish. Even if his insane plan to acquire Greenland sees fruition, he'd essentially be trading an island of 3.2 people of color for one of 55,000 people of color.

     When Trump had first made his intentions for Greenland known, world leaders could afford to laugh at him. But for some reason, they're not doing so now. This is what CNN had written recently: "To that end, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen signaled on Wednesday that the country wants to discuss the issue more with the incoming Trump administration. 'We are open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled,' Rasmussen told reporters."

     What's making world leaders' sphincters tighten this time around is that Trump hasn't ruled out military force to grab Greenland and the Panama Canal.

 

Oh, Canada...

In at least one aspect, Trump's bullying has already seemingly bourne fruit- The resignation of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.

    Now, anyone who knows anything at all about Canadian politics knows that what's happening in Ottawa has nothing to do with Trump's bloviations and childish taunts from Mar a Lago. Trudeau has been battling low approval ratings and a series of defections from within his Cabinet, culminating with the resignation of Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland. Plus, it's expected that Trudeau's Liberal Party is going to get their asses handed to them in the upcoming elections in February. Of course, Trump's crowing on his dunghill on Truth Social that he was the reason why Trudeau quit.

     It doesn't matter very much to Canadian voters that their country had enjoyed peace and prosperity for much of the 11 years that Trudeau has been their Prime Minister. There's a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that's affecting more than just the United States, If you don't believe me, look at what has happened in Argentina and Italy. Now. thanks partly to Elon Musk, there's a growing wave of support in Germany for the AfD, which is nothing less than the new Nazi Party.

   Trump's trolling of Trudeau's Canada resumed right after the election when Trump began making his threats of raising tariffs on Canada, our largest trading partner. He began by calling Trudeau "Governor Trudeau" and more than suggesting that their only way around his tariffs is to become "the 51st state", which is a bottomlessly absurd thing to even suggest (One wonders if Trump even knows Canada is part of the British Empire or cares.).

   Of course, Trudeau could've and should've clapped back by calling Trump "Russian Vice President Trump" because it would be vastly more accurate than "Governor Trudeau". 

   But the resurrection of his obsession with Greenland notwithstanding, Trump is showing alarming ambitions of imperialist expansion, ambitions that he seems willing to back up with military force. He's talking about invading northern Mexico to do battle with drug cartels and he even wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America". What's next? Is he going to order the state of New Mexico to be renamed "New America"?

    And how is MAGA going to square this tough guy posture with the guy for whom they voted, one who's bragged for years about keeping America out of wars in foreign countries? I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that once again, Trump is canoodling with hostile tinpot dictators like Putin while antagonizing our allies.

     With seemingly no guardrails in place this time around, it's impossible to see how any of this will lead to anything good come January 20th. And it will only be a matter of time before Trump gets us into a Mexican standoff. Or. should I say, an American standoff.