Trump Unchained

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/trump-unchained

Trump Unchained
Paul Waldman
June 10, 2018

There's no grand strategy behind Trump's picking a fight with Canada's Justin Trudeau—just the president's desperation to prove that he can do whatever he wants.


"You are a king," Donald Trump's father reportedly told him. And the thing about being a king is that nobody gets to tell you what to do.

It's becoming clear that few parts of the president's character are as important as how harshly he reacts to any attempt to constrain him. He grew up in wealth, and without any sense of obligation to anyone. As the head of a private company, he had no board of directors overseeing him and no one to answer to. And today, the very idea that someone might try to push him in one direction or another—let alone force him to do something like testify before a grand jury or reveal his tax returns—seems to fill him with rage.

Seldom has a leader mattered more as an individual, divorced from institutional imperatives, party commitments, international alliances, traditional norms, and historical forces. Indeed, that was part of the appeal Trump made to voters, and the thing that made many in his party suspicious of him. He'd be unpredictable, unmoored, and in the best interpretation, unsullied by a corrupt system.

It turned out, of course , that he is far more corrupt than the system he claimed he'd clean up; it's just that his corruption is purely personal. And as he rampages across the globe, we're seeing what a truly unconstrained president looks like.

Right now, he is vigorously challenging the very idea that America should need or want alliances, or even friends. "America First" turns out to mean America alone, to such a degree that Trump is doing everything in his power to alienate and antagonize the countries that share our democratic values and with whom we've spent decades attempting to build an international system that could foster peace and stability. While continuing to act as though his fondest wish is to win the affection of every authoritarian thug around the world—none more so than Vladimir Putin—Trump has decided to pick a fight with Canada. Canada, for God's sake.

snip//

From his supremely narcissistic perspective, anyone telling him what to do—a group of allies wanting to coordinate economic and security policy, lawyers insisting he respect the law, a bunch of experts pleading with him to prepare for a high-stakes nuclear summit—is something to rebel against, to smash with his tiny fists until everyone knows who's really in charge. And the more appalled they are, the more he's convinced that he's doing the right thing.

[Doreen]

1. It's called being a dictator.

[smirkymonkey]

2. Where did his father, son of a whore-monger, and a sleazy slum lord himself, ever get the idea

that the Trumps were a family of "kings"? Where did their sense of superiority and entitlement come from? They are the scum of the earth and always have been. It just amazes me how delusional that family is.

[Mc Mike]

7. Royal family bloodline. Why Friedrich married Mary MacLeod.

She's super inbred, to stack up that royal family blood.

[Volaris]

8. Well clearly the IN-bred, hasnt been bred back OUT just yet.

Maybe barron will turn out ok..

[Mc Mike]

14. Someone around here indicated B got caviar baths.

(I can't say 'many are saying' that.)

Maybe there's some genetic therapeutic value to that. Or tsar dRump just has a rasputin figure advising him.

[RandomAccess]

3. I disagree with this -- for 2 reasons, named

Navarro and Kudlow, two of his close economical head honchos.

They piled on Trudeau IMMEDIATELY, and FIERCELY, actually even going well beyond Trump's intemperate rhetoric. And ALL of it was a severe over-reaction.

Why?

What purpose did it serve??

It was a PR gambit of some kind, I'll warrant you that. But -- what? Again, what purpose? What were they trying to achieve?

One thought I had as a possibility, tho it doesn't seem strong enough to me to be THE answer to my question, is merely to blame Trump's own bad behavior and essentially blowing up the Summit on Trudeau.

I dunno.

[babylonsister]

4. I read today they piled on

because the 'strategy' is to show dt as powerful and in control ahead of the summit, so they had to defend his actions.
I can't remember where I saw that, but supposedly that explains their actions.

[dhol82]

5. Agree, it seems weird.

Guess we will find out what this is all about in the next week.
Damn.
We live in interesting times.

[erronis]

6. It's a strange world, isn't it. Used to be that we would be analyzing the politburo or some

other opaque government apparatus. Trying to figure out Mao's or Stalin's or Hitler's reasoning.

Now we only have to wonder about an unhinged US president and his snivelings. Unless it is just an installed puppet and we get back to Stalin/etc.

[Progressive2020]

9. Disturbing

It is disturbing that Trump is picking a fight with Canada, one of our closest allies. Russia is run by an Authoritarian Regime and Oligarchs, yet Trump wants them back in the G7/G8. So, Trump is kowtowing to Russia, but has a problem with Canada.

I find it to be astounding that Trump is alienating Canada and also our European Allies, yet has no problems with Dictators like Putin. Trump is hostile to Democracies, yet friendly to Dictators and Authoritarian Regimes. Disturbing.

The Original Post is spot on. This is what you get when you have an emotionally and mentally unstable narcissist as a leader. Similar in some ways to Stalin and Mussolini. This is compounded by the low level of intelligence and negligible education of Trump.

Trump is ignorant, a bully, and a narcissist. He was relatively harmless when he was in private business, but has become extremely dangerous since being elected to the highest office. The supreme achievement of a dangerous narcissist. He needs to be voted out or impeached, asap, before something terrible happens, like the use of nuclear weapons.

[TalenaGor]

10. president affluenza

[Amaryllis]

11. It's more complicated than that. He wants to destroy NATO. PUtin has wanted that for a long time.

[debsy]

12. Yes. It is, and always has been, about what Putin wants.

Nothing else matters.

[MyOwnPeace]

13. And that............

"service" to Putin becomes more and more apparent every single day!

[Orsino]

15. Nope. We are seeing Trump in chains.

Even he is smart enough to realize that having allies means other people doing his work for him.

That he is devoting even half-assed concentration and "work" on replacing Western alliances with trade wars means that Putin and China are pulling on his leash, offering the carrot of propping up his real-estate interests and the stick of exposure. He is heavily compromised, an unwilling and incompetent agent of foreign powers who want us isolated and weakend.

Expect Chinese and Russian expansion, unhindered by whatever's left of the West.