Trump thinks he's king of the world
No matter how many times war, politics and economics prove he's got it all wrong
It’s time to scrap those checkers vs. chess metaphors. For a while they were an apt way to characterize Donald Trump’s shallow, heedless approach to life and governing, but he (and we) are now in a far more dangerous phase. Gaming out consequences, and acting accordingly, is off the board in this Trump administration. Even when they’re predictable and immediate. Even when the stakes are life and death, both political and literal.
The common thread in this chaotic and ongoing disruption is Trump’s fantasy that he is master of the universe. He sets in motion forces he believes he can control, and then it turns out — over and over again — that he can’t.
It started a year ago with Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs. Other countries not only did not fold, they decided they could no longer rely on America. U.S. trading partners and allies are looking to China and to each other. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talked of a “rupture” and proposed a path forward involving partnerships among “intermediate” powers such as his nation. “The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney argued in January.
By the time the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, tariffs had already changed the global order in ways damaging to America, and as tariffs drove up prices, the economic order changed in ways damaging to Trump, the Republican Party and, above all, American businesses and consumers. The war — as Iran bombed U.S. installations throughout the Middle East and closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic — accelerated both of those trends. None of this was unexpected, except to Trump.
To be fair, a third major item on the growing unanticipated-consequences list — redistricting — did produce a bit of a surprise: Democratic ferocity equal to Trump’s original action of asking (telling?) the Texas GOP to draw him five more House seats in a rare mid-decade redistricting. Gov. Greg Abbott and the state legislature complied, as did legislatures in North Carolina and Missouri.
But California Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly responded by championing a ballot measure to redraw the state’s maps and flip as many as five House seats for Democrats. State voters agreed, and Virginia voters — with support from new Gov. Abigail Spanberger — did likewise last week, approving a map that adds four new likely Democratic districts.
Maryland’s Wes Moore, America’s only black governor, has accused Trump of “political redlining” and said his state must “do its part to ensure that Congress is able to function as a meaningful check on executive overreach.” If legislative Democrats could be convinced, the party could net one seat by adding liberals to Maryland’s only Republican-leaning district. And in Utah, Democrats benefitted from court rulings that preserved a likely Democratic House seat in blue Salt Lake City.
Florida is up this week with Gov. Ron DeSantis lobbying GOP legislators to pass a map designed to flip four seats to the Republican side. Yet there’s some risk that diluting Republican strength in some districts to make others more swingy would create more Democratic wins in this year of anti-Trump backlash and Democratic overperformance.
Former Barack Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer cited one factor in his Tuesday headline: “DeSantis Is Betting the House on Latino Voters Who’ve Already Left.” If state legislators pass the DeSantis map and it survives Florida courts, we’ll find out who’s right. In short, the whole thing might backfire bigtime.
The alternative to House Democratic control, as Moore noted, would be more of the same: a passive Republican Congress enabling an unfettered Trump to continue his rampage across the U.S. government and beyond, with “no ethics, no empathy and no end to his narcissism,” as Tom Edsall wrote recently in the New York Times.
Which brings us to Trump’s most dangerous out-of-control adventure: An overarching permission structure to say anything and do anything, no matter how brutish, racist, violent, cruel, incendiary, or false. Incitement and vengeance are his lifeblood.
While asserting he “hates” to say it, he says he’s “honored” that people have tried to assassinate him three times in the last two years — because assassins and would-be assassins only target the “the big names,” like him. The most impactful people. The ones who deserve the honor. As he put it after the shooting incident Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
The people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much because they like it that way. And when you look at the people that have either, whether it was an attempt or a successful attempt, they’re very impactful people. Just take a look at the names here, the big names. And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot. We’ve done a lot. We’ve taken this country and we were a laughingstock for years and now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’ve changed this country and there are a lot of people that are not happy about that. So I think that’s the answer.
It’s not the answer. He’s got it backwards. We were the hottest country in late 2024, with an economy deemed “the envy of the world” by the Economist and “remarkable” by the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Then came Trump, the sequel. Now we are the laughingstock. The disgrace. The rogue nation driving volatility and oil shortages and military attacks that are upending the Middle East and the world.
The real answer is Trump himself. He inflames people with his crudeness, racism, xenophobia, and hostility to immigrants, pluralism, free speech, science, modernity, and anything he didn’t think of first (like the hard-won, carefully negotiated Obama-era agreement that kept a lid on Iran’s nuclear program — the one that Trump tossed out in his first term.)
Trump is right that he’s impactful. In all the ways that make America the opposite of great.
In case you missed it:
April 20: JD Vance Can Forget About 2028
The vice presidency is coveted by many, won by few, and often seen as a direct route to even greater power. But the job is far from a guarantee of promotion, especially if you have to win an election along the way. And that’s growing ever less likely for the hapless JD Vance.
Sure, he might ascend to the presidency sooner rather than later if, one way or another, Donald Trump leaves office before January 2029. But even if Vance is an incumbent by 2028, is there a path for him to win? I’m betting no.
April 1: Trump Keeps Trying to Play the Hero. Don't Be Fooled
I’m very glad that after more than a month without pay, money is finally flowing to the Transportation Safety Administration employees who staff airport security lines. I’m also livid that their paychecks have resumed because Donald Trump—after refusing to negotiate with either party in Congress—now comes to save the day, as it were, via executive action…
Congressional negotiations are slow and exasperating, and that’s by design. Same with the Constitution assigning taxing and spending authority to Congress. Can you imagine if all presidents used the federal budget as a gigantic slush fund to spend at will?
The more we expose Trump's madness, the closer the Resistance will get to victory. Republicans are trying to project strength where weakness is their reality. The overwhelming sentiment is that Trump must go. Mar-a-Lago will be the place where he can talk to the walls and proclaim his greatness. The final act of a boring play.
In response to an article in the Free Press about the second Comey indictment being about to backfire, as if it were the height of Trump’s depredations, I wrote:
"The problem here is that the entire Trump presidency, both the complete first term and the incomplete second has been, at best a national tragedy and embarrassment. It is utterly inconceivable this man, who completely disdains and disavows our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law could seen by any American, no matter how dissatisfied with their lot as anything remotely resembling the kind of person who should occupy the Oval Office. Indeed he exemplifies the greatest fears of our Framers in their hesitations in creating the office.
It was clear both during both of his presidential campaigns and from the very start of his first inaugural that he had absolutely no concept of the nature and purpose of our founding, or that he cared to have any such concept. His motives in seeking the presidency were and remain entirely self-serving, having nothing to do with our national welfare, security, or character. He has twice taken the Presidential Oath without any intent to honor it.
The leaders of the party he claimed to respresent understood this from the beginning, and said so before they chose to seek to use him to their own advantage, a choice almost as mad as that of those Germans who in 1933 thought they could use Hitler in the same way.
It quickly became clear that the institutions designed to prevent the excesses of a rogue executive were likely to be insufficient to the task so long as enough Americans supported him and Republican legislators enabled him. He was partially and barely sufficiently constrained by members of his Cabinet and administration during his first term, but he learned that lesson quickly and took advantage of what he learned in choosing his second Cabinet and administration.
Now he has turned this once proud nation into a national disgrace and an international pariah, and he may well have done irreparable damage to our Republic, yet far too many Americans still support his increasing instability and dementia.
So I may be forgiven for suggesting that whatever efforts inside the law and Constitution that were used to attempt to constrain him and to take him permanently off the presidenciak stage were and remain entirely justified.indeed, the only problem with them is that they have so far largely failed."
Yes, Trump thinks he the Master of the Universe, but the real problem is that so many Americans have bought into his fantasy. Without them, he would still be only an incompetent NYC real estate ‘mogul’ with a penchant for self-glorification.