Rambling Trump runs through his achievements as worried world watches on | Donald Trump
“I “He was a hell of a baseball player, you wouldn’t believe it,” Donald Trump said, suddenly wistful as he recalled his salad days when his mother would tell him, “Son, you could be a professional baseball player,” and he would respond, “Thanks, Mom.” Carpe Diem !
Tuesday is not the first time that the American president has strayed far from the subject. The focal point of this story was a “tall building” that “dominated the park” in Queens, New York, where he played little league baseball. When he asked her why there were bars on the windows, she told him it was a psychiatric hospital.
Trump, 79, a self-described “very stable genius” who keeps “passing” cognitive tests, made so many references to “mentally insane” and “insane asylums” in the White House briefing room that it sounded like insecurity. It also provided scant comfort to a world that fears that the future of the transatlantic alliance now lies in the hands of a modern Caligula.
For more than an hour and a half, Trump marked his first year in office by reading in a slow, monotonous tone from the list of his accomplishments, as if he were deliberately torturing his old adversary, the media, crowded together shoulder to shoulder. The list has become as repetitive – and scary – as Jack Torrance typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over in The Shining.
Trump has gone on wild zigzags, from “I like Hispanics” to naked xenophobia towards Somalia, from the big lie that he won the 2020 election to firing former special adviser Jack Smith as “a sick son of a bitch”, from renaming coal as “clean, beautiful coal” to renaming the Gulf of Mexico “Trump’s Gulf” (the last one was a joke, he promised).
Along the way, he was surprised when he called the fatal shooting of Renée Good by ICE in Minneapolis a “tragedy” and a “horrible thing,” but perhaps not so surprising when he added that he recently learned that Good’s parents were “tremendous Trump fans.”
And as the president brandished a giant file — no, not Epstein — there was an unexpected fight with a paper clip. “Whoa!” » he exclaimed. “I’m glad my finger wasn’t in that sucker. It could have caused damage, but you know what? I wouldn’t have shown the pain. I would have gone back. Damn, did you hear that? That was nasty. But I wouldn’t have shown the pain. I would have acted like nothing happened when my finger fell off.”
So much for stable genius. Sitting in the crowded briefing room was like being on a bus full of commuters who realize the driver has slammed the brakes and laugh as they plunge downhill.
Comedian Tom Lehrer once said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. » It made a comeback when Donald Trump was offered the Nobel Peace Prize by the real winner, Venezuelan María Corina Machado, and grabbed it like an enthusiastic schoolboy.
But he is still angry at Norway, a country he once admired for sending — unlike Somalia — the right kind of immigrants. In a message this weekend to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump said he no longer felt obligated to think only about peace.
“We put an end to eight endless wars in 10 months,” he insisted on Tuesday. “I should have received the Nobel Prize for every war, but I don’t say that. I save millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shooting, okay? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shooting. It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige.”
Everyone in Europe is wondering: how could America elect the Joker and can the fate of global security really depend on the bruised ego of one man? Once again, the commander-in-chief offered little to reassure his neocolonial ambitions. A journalist asked: “How far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?” » The president replied: “You will know. »
Another questioned whether the breakup of the NATO alliance was a price worth paying for Greenland. Trump insisted: “Something is going to happen that will be very good for everyone. »
Good for Vladimir Putin, perhaps, whose dream of driving a wedge between NATO allies is finally coming true.
At his inauguration, Trump stood in the rotunda of the US Capitol to proclaim a new golden age for America as the tech lords looked on. A year later, he kept repeating himself in a soporific, almost insulting voice, in the kind of baffled performance that would have led Republicans to demand that Joe Biden be removed from office under the 25th Amendment and committed to a mental institution.
Will someone in Washington stand up and pull the emergency brake before it’s too late?
