Of all the commandments for living under Donald Trump, the first is always this: don’t believe him. Nothing he says can be taken at face value; everything should be fed into a polygraph. Those of scrupulous courtesy can wrap it up in red ribbon, or uncork that aphorism about how the man must be taken seriously but never literally. All the same, scratch a Trump promise and underneath will glint a pretext. Scrutinise his grand plans and you find only shabby tactics.
When the US president kidnaps the head of a foreign state and accuses him of being some kingpin of cocaine, remember how, just last month, Trump claimed his prime focus was actually fentanyl, which he termed “a weapon of mass destruction”, since it and other synthetic opioids account for nearly 70% of all drug-overdose deaths in the US. When he claims that abducting Nicolás Maduro was strictly law enforcement, tot up the 150-plus aircraft, including Delta Force choppers, bombs and special ops troops, and see if you can’t spot a unilateral act of war.
Any other country that did this wouldn’t receive indulgent op-eds about its “gunboat diplomacy” – it would rightly be condemned as a rogue state, and its oligarchs’ foreign assets impounded. The absence of such action is the true “Trump derangement syndrome”. Yet in this week’s barrage of Trumpsplaining, analysts still claim to see in his actions evidence of some grand strategy. Next, we are confidently assured, the US president will annex Greenland. Yet this is not an administration that wants to colonise; instead it demands compliance.
Trump certainly seemed to enjoy the military strike on Maduro’s compound, watching it on television in Mar-a-Lago and declaring it a “brilliant operation, actually”. He might well demand a box set of further such adventures faraway, especially if they aid the November midterms. But stick around and deal with the mess, the admin, the corpses? Fat chance. Democrats and Republicans alike saw how well that went in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Will Trump rule Venezuela, or Greenland? It would make a change if he ruled the US. The president is a fair way through his second term in office, yet we are still to see Trumpism in one country, let alone around the world. For all the rhetoric and locker-room bullying, Trump’s time in office has been about dismembering the government – even that vital task outsourced, to Elon Musk and his chainsaw – and setting troops on Democratic cities he doesn’t like, then blustering his way through a federal shutdown. The result of all this indecision and chaos is personal approval ratings that have sunk below those of “Sleepy Joe” Biden.
