Wednesday, 8 January 2025

Trump's descent into madness begins

I think we all knew that the election of Trump meant Washington would get a bit chaotic but I don’t believe anyone could have anticipated how insane things would become even before the official inauguration on 20 January. Yesterday the president-elect gave a totally unhinged press conference at his Florida retreat in Mar-a-Lago, the likes of which has never been seen outside a black comedy. It was terrifying and laughable at the same time. I think he’s gone completely demented.  Trump refused to rule out using military force or economic coercion to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. Think about that.

I can hardly believe I’m writing this about the next president of the USA in 2025. It's imperialism resurrected and writ large by the world’s most powerful nation. We are back to Germany circa 1938. For Austria and Czechoslovakia read Panama and Greenland. Trump essentially declared war on friendly neighbours unless they surrendered to his demands.  His descent into madness has started.

He claims America 'needs' control over Greenland in order to ‘protect the free world’ Remember this when he rewards Putin’s aggression by forcing Ukraine to give up Luhansk and Donetsk and renounce any claims on Crimea. This is from who we were advised was the “pro-peace” candidate.  So much for protecting the free world.

Listen to this:

Q: You didn't rule out using military coercion -- TRUMP: Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. People don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up.

Marco Rubio is Trump’s choice to head up the US Department of State, America's equivalent of the Foreign Office, beginning in a couple of weeks. Who would want to be him? He will need to smooth a lot of badly ruffled feathers when the new administration takes office.  God knows what he thought about yesterday's presser. I wonder how long he'll stick it out in the burning clown car that is the Trump White House?

Amazingly, Trump also claimed ‘people’ (i.e. himself) “don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to [Greenland]. But if they do, they should give it up.” Greenland was settled by Norsemen in the 13th century and when Norway and Denmark separated in 1814, Greenland was transferred to the Danish crown, and was fully integrated in the Danish state in 1953 under the Constitution of Denmark, which made the people in Greenland citizens of Denmark.  It has been Danish longer than the US existed. And what 'legal right' did Europeans have to North America?

I have no idea what the population of Greenland (57,000), now a self-governing autonomous territory of Denmark, think about their ties to a European country but I doubt that they have much interest in becoming part of the USA. The prime minister Múte Bourup Egede is said to be keen on independence but I wonder if Trump’s bizarre comments might have persuaded him to stick with Denmark and the EU for now?

We also learned that the Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed Gulf of America. How long before the English language becomes American? He also plans to use ‘economic force’ against Canada

The FT yesterday carried a piece by Edward Luce suggesting Elon Musk, effectively Trump's co-president for the time being, is declaring "War on America's Allies."  Trump seems to be doing just the same as if this is deliberate co-ordinated policy. 

Musk has launched attacks on the British government and sided with the neo-Nazi opposition in Germany.  I would be surprised if America has any friends and allies left if this is the pattern over the next four years. The Republican party may have knelt before Trump but most other countries aren't going to kowtow to him.

Worrying although that is, more concerning is Musk's plan to "tweak" the algorithms driving Twitter so that people see more positive news. He claims this is in response to "too much negativity" being pushed on the platform.

He has allowed Twitter to become a megaphone for Trump's relentless negativity about the USA, painting a picture of a dystopian Hellscape and a collapsing economy under Biden which his MAGA followers have happily consumed. In fact crime is down under the Democrats and the economy was described last year by Ryan Sweet, Chief US Economist at Oxford Economics like this:

"The US is holding up much better than other countries. It seems like the engine of the US economy continues to hum along where it's sputtering in other nations."

Trump obviously prefers for political reasons to have US voters believe the opposite.

But having created an alternative reality where America is sinking into a terrible abyss, Musk will turn this around come February and everything will appear to Twitter users to be just fine. This is 1984 and the Ministry of Truth spreading propaganda. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

And let's be honest, this will work. If you can get people to think a booming economy is near to collapse, I'm pretty sure you can do the reverse, at least among the people that you can 'fool all the time' as Churchill one said.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has announced they intend to get rid of their fact-checkers just as Twitter did after Musk took over saying it amounted to censorship. This will only affect American audiences initially but you can see the direction of travel. See this:

NEW: Fact-checkers claim they had no idea the company was going to end their partnerships and are scrambling to figure out the financial implications of the move.

And note this by Mr Zuckerberg, another billionaire who is only interested in enriching himself even further:

More from Zuck: "We're bringing back civic content. For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now..."

We are certainly in a new era. An extremely worrying one.

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