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My thesis on recent world events is that there is one simple explanation for everything Trump is doing. Namely, as a classic textbook narcissist, having also risen during the uniquely self centered context of the ‘80s and ‘90s business and television culture of the US, and having been propelled to the highest echelons a narcissist could taste, he’s beginning to sense his own physical and political mortality, certainly moreso than in his first term, and knowing that people will try to tarnish his name once he is out of power, he thus wants one and only one thing. For his name to appear prominently in the history books.
This is very simple and obvious in retrospect, but it ties everything together. Renaming major geographical features. Demolishing and rebuilding part of the White House. His fixation on the Nobel peace prize. (Note the letter he wrote today to Norway, linking Greenland to not getting the peace prize). Finally, major territorial expansion. Wait, that wasn’t the final one. Undoing the world order that was in place since the world wars. Now that would do it.
He’s seen himself as a world order undoer for quite some time now, perhaps since the beginning of his rise to power. But this, this is his greatest taste of the raw history changing might that has yet been possible. Either get Greenland and change the US map forever. Or be the sole reason for the undoing of NATO. History will never be able to ignore him.
What I don’t know is whether he cares much about whether the historical changes that he will oversee and be forever tied to his name in this ultimate egoic consummation will end up being good for the United States or not. There are obvious downsides to destroying a world order which has been meticulously crafted to put you yourself at the top. But riding the coattails of that world historical success was not fit for a man who’s ego needed to be propelled to similar—no, greater!—historical status.
Narcissism often flares out into the absurd. And we seem well along that track. But just how far it will attempt to go, in this, one of world history’s most consequential cases, remains to be seen. Trump is now a great man of history and we can only wait to see what of our era will survive his grandeur.
Edit: of course, file this for an early contender for the most obvious insight of the year award. I just think it’s a more congruent explanation for the whole set of second term Trump events that we’ve seen than a lot of other explanations I see floating around for recent events.
I'm not MAGA, but if I were, I'd think it was probably time to use the 25th Amendment to get President Vance.
Obviously, that's not gonna happen.
(I also thought the GOP should have been fine removing Trump last time to get President Pence. And the same for Biden and Kamala. No one listens to my great ideas.)
There are two core problems:
Basically, getting rid of Trump would be an act of selfless, patriotic self-sacrifice that the modern GOP is incapable of.
You could say the same thing about the democrats and Biden.
Not really. While it was undoubtedly an act of grotesque malfeasance and selfishness to hide Biden's state, even if we grant the most pessimistic assessments of Biden, he wasn't nearly as far gone nor as overtly harmful to the nation. One could quite reasonably conclude that Joe Biden's cabinet plus four hours a day of Joe Biden was a reasonable choice compared to the alternatives.
By contrast, with Mad King Donald and his cabinet of villains and Marco Rubio, almost any plausible alternative would be better (though JD Vance might be one of the only steps down).
Biden was indisputably further gone. You may have preferred his admin's governance, but he wasn't capable of putting complete sentences together.
I don't think Trump's sentences are any more coherent than Biden's were, he's just more forceful about them and comes across as less physically fragile.
Trump rambles and sometimes jumps erratically between different trains of thought but whichever token he's outputting at sentence position n usually bears at least some relation to token_n-3. Biden during the 2024 debates was much worse.
For what it's worth I think peak Biden was probably smarter than peak Trump.
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The two flavors of senility: fading into the background, and using anger to cover up not really understanding what's going on. Avoid saying anything coherent so nobody can tell that you couldn't hear what anyone said, or insist angrily that you are correct and force everyone around you to accommodate because it's awkward to tell grandpa he's wrong.
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