Jan.24

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That Didn't Take Long, Part III: There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back

A couple of weeks ago, we asked readers exactly how much they want to hear about it when Donald Trump says crazypants things. We hope to share some of those responses, once an opportunity presents itself. For now, we'll say that the solid consensus was "he's the president, and if he says crazy stuff, you kinda have to write about it." Some folks suggested we should only write about things where he's "serious." The problem there is that, with only a few exceptions, it's nearly impossible to separate "serious" from "hot air." The truth is, even Trump himself probably doesn't know, most of the time. He just throws a bunch of stuff out there, and sees what sticks.

We say this as prelude to a rundown of the crazypants speech he delivered yesterday, via video link, to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. You can read the text here, if you wish, or you can watch the speech here. If you do not wish to do either of those things (and who can blame you?), then here's a rundown of the "highlights":

• Victory: We do not know how long Trump will brag about having won the 2024 presidential election; it's entirely possible he will keep it up for his entire term. He continues to believe—or, at least, continues to claim—that he won a crushing victory, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. To yesterday's audience, he described it as "a massive mandate from the American people." The attendees sat stone-faced while he bragged. It would seem they were there to hear about economic policy, not Trump's political résumé.
  
  
• Biden Bashing: Trump also indulged in some score-settling with Joe Biden, badmouthing his predecessor, in much the same terms as he used in his inaugural address. In fact, his speechwriters might well have copied and pasted from one speech to the other. Again, the audience was nonplussed, as they don't especially care about these sorts of petty personal squabbles.
  
  
• Oh, Canada: Trump joked (is it a joke?), yet again, about making Canada the 51st state. The folks in attendance, nearly all of them European, thought that was quite amusing. Then, he started bashing Canada, declaring:

  Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it's not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit. We don't need them to make our cars, and they make a lot of them. We don't need their lumber because we have our own forests, et cetera, et cetera. We don't need their oil and gas.

  The audience was less enamored of that part. Then, the President moved on to slamming the EU, denouncing European trade policies, and threatening to slap tariffs on everything. The crowd found that decidedly un-amusing.
  
  
• Interest Rates: Trump also advised that he would "demand" that the Federal Reserve reduce interest rates. He continues to illustrate that he doesn't really understand how this works, and that any change to interest rates creates some winners and some losers. Further, the Europeans know the U.S. economic system well enough to know that the Fed does not actually answer to the president, and has no obligation to bow to his demands.
  
  
• Trans Bashing: We have always had the impression that Trump doesn't much care about LGBTQ stuff, and that all of his anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was just pandering to the base. However, he's returned to the anti-trans verbiage so many times recently, and with such vehemence, that we're thinking that maybe we were wrong. Again veering off topic for what was supposed to be a speech about economic policy, Trump told the crowd: "I've made it official—an official policy of the United States that there are only two genders, male and female, and we will have no men participating in women's sports, and transgender operations, which became the rage, will occur very rarely."
  
  This is yet another area where he was apparently expecting that the Europeans don't really know how the U.S. government works. They do, and they know that he cannot make these things happen by fiat. But beyond that, this portion of his speech was not just off-topic or boring to many of the attendees, it was offensive. And so, a fair number of audience members walked out as Trump ranted and raved.
  
  
• Ukraine: Near the end of the speech, Trump advised that he wants to end the war in Ukraine. That, of course, is not crazypants. However, the way he said it is kind of crazypants. Here's the quote:

  Our efforts to secure a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine are now hopefully underway. It's so important to get that done. That is an absolute killing field. Millions of soldiers are being killed. Nobody's seen anything like it since World War II. They're laying dead all over the flat fields. It's a flat field, farmland, and there's millions of Russians and millions of Ukrainians. And nobody's seen anything like it since World War II. It's time to end it.

  It's hard to know where this way of characterizing things came from. Is he thinking of the movie The Killing Fields, which is about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia? It's possible; that movie was made in 1984, and Trump's cultural references tend to be 40+ years out of date. Or is he maybe thinking of the poem "In Flanders Fields," which is about the dead of World War I? Could be.

To continue the theme of these first three items, we're less than a week into the second Trump presidency, and this is already where we are at. And while this is undoubtedly a very subjective judgment, it seems to us that he's noticeably more unhinged than he was in January 2017. If we are right about that, then we can think of several possible explanations. Maybe it's a byproduct of mental decline. Or maybe it's that he's spent 4 more years absorbing the flattering right-wing propaganda. Or maybe it's that he no longer has to worry about elections, and he's letting it all hang out. In any event, that's today's crazypants report. (Z)