Sep.08
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Hey! Look Over There!

Even by his standards, Donald Trump had an unusually unhinged Labor Day weekend. To be honest, we really don't like writing items like this one, because they are kind of soul-crushing. On the other hand, when it's this much stuff, and it's this nutty, we just can't ignore it. We're going to run these down in roughly chronological order:

The Arc de Trump: This story actually began to hit the front pages in the middle of last week, but the White House doubled- and tripled-down over the weekend. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum claims that the administration does not need no stinkin' approvals to build the Arc de Trump, and so ground will be broken on the project sometime in the next 2 weeks.

A fair question is: Why the rush? We see only two plausible answers. The first is that Trump and Burgum know that if they try to do this through normal channels, it will never get built. Either the approval won't be there, or the money won't be there, or it will be tied up in court, or all of the above. The second is that Trump is desperate to get it started before the midterms. We'll address our theories as to why the midterms would matter later in this item.

New America: Among the stories that appear here, this was the first "new" news that we heard about this weekend. Fresh off his "triumph" in renaming Lake Ontario (which polls report Americans oppose 63% to 14%, a margin of more than 4-to-1 against), Trump declared that his next foray into cartography might be to rename New Mexico as "New America." Here is the map he posted to his social media platform for the phony tough and the crazy brave:

It's a map of New Mexico, with the Mexico crossed out in a program like paintbrush, and America typed in underneath that

You can tell Trump did not create this map himself, since there is no Sharpie usage.

When we heard about this story, we presumed that Trump was just trolling the libs. If you think renaming a lake by fiat is unpopular, wait until a president tries to rename a state by fiat. Especially the one that has "Mexico" in the name. Plus, someone surely must have told Trump that, unlike Lake Ontario or the Gulf of Mexico, the names of the U.S. states are set by law. The bill that conferred statehood on New Mexico, signed by William Howard Taft on January 6, 1912, says that the name is "New Mexico." Only Congress can change it.

Trump Gone Wild: We presume that Trump would never get the therapy he so desperately needs, because that is "weak" in his mind, and so he's using social media as a replacement. In any event, the "New America" post was actually a part of a run of disturbing, mostly-AI-driven, posts to Truth Social over the span of about 3 hours. We see no other way to do justice to how unhinged it was, so here is a rundown:

Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy.

New North America: It would seem that a lake, a state and a gulf are not enough for Trump, and that he's hungry for more. And so, the morning after posting the "New America" image, the President followed up with this:

A map of North America with a U.S. flag imposed over all of it. That includes Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, as well as Greenland, Iceland, the nations of the Caribbean, and the northern chunk of Central America

We will point out, once again, that Trump is in a trade war with Canada. He is also ostensibly working with Mexico on immigration and fentanyl smuggling. And he wants both of those countries to agree to an updated trade agreement. Disrespecting the sovereignty of both nations is not going to help on any of those fronts.

Meanwhile, we are not surprised that Cuba and other Caribbean nations, along with part of Central America, were suddenly "subsumed" into America. Trump certainly has aspirations to take over Cuba. Further, he's proven himself to be a colonialist, and the visual required that all the nations on the map be included. However, note that the flag "starts over" with Greenland. Note also that the island on the far right of the map could have been cropped out without ruining the overall visual effect. We are interpreting these facts as evidence that the people making maps for Trump's social media feed, and the people checking them over, are morons who don't realize that island to the east of Greenland is not part of Greenland and is, in fact, Iceland.

By the way—and this doesn't fit anywhere else, so we're just sticking it here—two can play at this silly map-renaming game (at least, for a short while). Someone, and we have no idea how they did this, apparently managed to briefly rename the Lincoln Reflecting Pool on Google Maps as Ozaawiminaazo Inini Reflecting Pool. That is reportedly Ojibwe for "Orange Colored Man Reflecting Pool."

Happy Labor Day!: Everyone knows that, even on the occasion of a holiday or a death, times when the majority of mature adults rise above politics for a moment, Trump simply cannot resist the opportunity to get in a dig. He did not "disappoint" with his Labor Day message:

Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they're not. They're going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we're not going to let that happen. We're going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Trump was elected to represent 100% of Americans, including those who did not vote for him. Every other president understood this, and took seriously their duty to the entire country. Trump has no interest in being president to the people who did not vote for him. In fact—and we don't think we're out of line or in error in writing this at this point—we think he would be perfectly happy if the people who did not vote for him were to die en masse tomorrow.

This Is What Fascism Looks Like... Literally: Finally, Trump posted an AI-generated image (naturally) of what he wants the uniforms of the U.S. Space Force to look like:

They are dark gray with black trim, harsh collars, black jackboots, and black belts with a silver buckle. They have a chevron on both the buckle and the arm that looks like the Starfleet symbol from 'Star Trek.'

Trump did not hide the fact—in fact, he bragged about it—that the aesthetic is borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the 1997 film Starship Troopers.

The President is so culturally illiterate, and so unable to grasp even hit-you-over-the-head subtext, that he presumably did not realize what he was admitting to here. The fellow who wrote the book, Robert Heinlein, was a conservative in the Rand Paul mold, and ended up producing a text that was either outright fascist, or was at least fascist-curious. The fellow who directed the movie, Paul Verhoven, did not want to make a fascist film, and so he intended the movie as a parody of fascism. The uniforms worn by the Starship Troopers (i.e., the people being mocked as fascists) were thus modeled on the uniforms of the Nazis. They are also very similar to the uniforms worn by officers of the Empire in the Star Wars films. Those uniforms were also modeled on the uniforms of the Nazis, with several scenes in those movies being effectively lifted from Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler propaganda piece Triumph of the Will.

For Trump, a fascist vibe is undoubtedly a feature, not a bug. But if he had any awareness whatsoever of the subtext of Starship Troopers, we seriously doubt he would have been so open in bragging about his inspiration.

Again, there is just so much lunacy here, we could not let it pass.

So, what is driving all of this? We think there are three plausible explanations, and they are not mutually contradictory, so all three might be correct:

Mental Illness/Cognitive Decline: This is the default explanation on social media. We are hardly in a position to make a diagnosis ourselves, since we haven't got the correct training, and we have not examined him. But it sure seems like he's growing more unhinged every week. Could be because he's feeling anxious about losing the midterms and/or eventually losing the legal protections the presidency affords. Could be because he's an elderly man who is exhausted by the demands of his job, and who is not bearing up well under all the invective hurled in his direction. But it certainly could also be that there's been a physical change of some sort, and he is legitimately not well.

Midterm Strategy: Trump only has one electoral strategy, and it's "more of me." It's already clear that he plans to "save" the GOP by putting himself front and center this midterm cycle, whether or not the other Republicans want that. This weekend's silly stunts are the kind of thing that has worked well for him in the past, earning him a lot of free publicity, firing up the base, and enraging the libs.

If this is what is going on, however, then there are some obvious problems with this strategy. First, Trump is not on the ballot. We already have abundant evidence that MAGA works far less well when his name is not there to prop it up. Second, he is arguably as unpopular as he's ever been right now, perhaps even more unpopular than he was after the 1/6 insurrection. That is not a good time for Republicans to run on his record or his message. Third, Trump's shtick has gotten old and stale. It happened with his reality show, which had worse ratings every season it was on. And now, it's happening with his political stunts. Yes, we are writing about this weekend's nonsense, because there was so much of it, and because it's indicative of where he is as we move into "midterm crunch time." But, by and large, these stunts are just engendering a lot of eye-rolling, and people are moving on within days... or hours. By all indications, stuff like "New America" and The United States of North America aren't even getting MAGA voters excited.

Distraction: As we have written several times, we're no longer sure what things are the distractions, and what things are being distracted from. But we do know that the Iran War is a mess (and see below), that the economy is in a bad place right now (see below, once again) and that the Epstein files haven't gone anywhere. Every column inch that is taken up by a story about Lake America is, ostensibly, one less column inch devoted to a story about inflation.

That said, we don't think this is working as well as it once did, either. These stunts and these culture wars battles just don't get as much oxygen as they once did. Meanwhile, people don't actually need a story every single day about inflation. Every other day is enough, particularly when voters are personally suffering the ill effects. Put it this way: We cannot imagine a world in which the headlines on Nov. 4 are "GOP Majority Saved by Trump's Mapmaking Shenanigans."

We write all of this, of course, on the cusp of the Trump-driven midterm "convention," which will take place on Wednesday and Thursday. Any or all of the explanations above could also explain what is driving the event, where Trump will be the featured speaker on both nights.

We do not think the convention will help the GOP, nor do we think it will hurt the GOP. And we think both of these things for the same reason: Nobody is going to watch, except for the True Believers (and even many of them will surely take a pass, since NFL football is way more interesting than a Trump speech). Heck, the TV networks, even the ones on cable, have yet to commit to even covering the event. It may be necessary to watch online, or else on some high-number channel like Newsmax.

We feel a little bit strange, given the focus of the site, that we don't intend to watch the thing. But we just can't see any purpose in doing so, especially since many Republican officeholders are also taking a pass (most obviously, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, has sent in his "regrets" and won't be there). It's going to be a glorified Trump rally, and we know what the story is without even having to see it. The story is that, as with this weekend, Trump is leaning hard into the things that worked for him in 2016. But it's not 2016 anymore, and Trump's inability to accept that and to try to course-correct (his best play would be to make himself as invisible as is possible for the next 3 months) is going to work to the detriment of his party. The only question, at this point, is exactly how much of a detriment. (Z)


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