The president has met the enemy, and they are us. The post Trump is a Wartime President appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Last week, Donald Trump dropped virtual “bombs” on American citizens, demolished a prized symbol of American democracy and leadership, and demanded $230 million in reparations from taxpayers for what he calls unlawful attacks on him.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Trump does not wish to rule as a king or impose an authoritarian regime. People around him very much want the latter. He may think that this is his aim. But it is not.
Some have suggested that the MAGA movement is creating a civil war between the red and blue states. But not Trump.
The president is at war with the United States—the entire country—all of us. He seeks not to rule but to destroy.
What inspires such malice? This country has, in Trump’s mind, brutalized him. In 2020, Trump found Joe Biden to be such a flimsy candidate that he was in terror of being defeated by him. Trump’s unconscious mind is never far from his tongue. On October 16, 2020, he confided in a rally audience that he was terrified of losing to Biden: “Running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics puts pressure on me. Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics. I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.”
He did lose. He has tried to rewrite history, but he knows who won in 2020, which makes him furious.
Not only did he lose to a candidate he regarded as a zombie, but he also has memories of 2016, when he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton by 2 percent, nearly 3 million votes. Twice, then, his fellow Americans had preferred others over him. And in 2024, his dream of a majority of the popular vote against Kamala Harris was just out of reach. Harris held him to 49.8 percent.
For all his talk about “an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump knows that three times he has gone up against candidates he despises—a white woman, a Black woman, and a superannuated old-style pol—and that three times he has failed to secure a decisive win. Twice, in fact, he has, by some measure, lost.
Trump has a long memory for slights. He remains angry and resentful over the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ failure to give an Emmy to The Apprentice two decades ago. “The Emmys are all politics, that’s why, despite nominations, The Apprentice never won—even though it should have many times over,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. His rage extends not only to his enemies (whom he wants jailed and perhaps executed) but even to some who have helped him over the years. His unwittingly comic legal Complaint against The New York Times cites, as one example of the Grey Lady’s gross libels, the mere statement that the producer who brought Trump onto The Apprentice had helped create that TV franchise. No indeed—according to his lawyers, sole credit for the show must go to Trump’s “global profile and charisma.”
Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time whining about how this or that person owes him an apology, and perhaps should be jailed for not giving it. His mental world is bleak, a haunted mansion of anger and grievance.
How can we expect such a person to forgive his fellow Americans for preferring someone else to him?
Trump’s fury with the country explains many otherwise puzzling facts about his conduct in office during his second term. Media coverage and his rhetoric suggest that his animus is directed toward blue states, while his love embraces the red. But love is as love does, and Trump’s policies have been as adverse to his allies as to his foes. His assault on the federal government has been indiscriminate, taking in federal disaster relief and cancer research, both of which benefit all Americans. He has shut down the government rather than extend health-care subsidies that rural and red-state residents rely on for medical and hospital care. In particular, the sweeping tariffs he has attempted to impose threaten devastation to agricultural areas and agricultural states—consider that he has not only managed to cut American farmers’ soybean exports to China to near zero, but is now sending $40 billion to Argentina, which has stepped in to supply the Chinese at market rates. His immigration jihad is also directed disproportionately at agricultural workers, whom Trump-loving farmers depend on to bring in the crops.
He has deliberately crippled the national security and intelligence apparatus that protects the nation against foreign and terrorist attacks. An authoritarian would nurture these; an enemy wipes them out.
As Christmas approaches, not even American children escape his unwinking malice—“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,”—making him almost certainly the only American president to come out against Santa Claus.
He has begun preparing our military to flood the streets of American cities in a war against “the enemy within,” who is, as Walt Kelly’s immortal Pogo once said, us. During the 2024 campaign, he told a rally that “The crazy lunatics that we have—the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country . . . are more dangerous—the enemy from within—than Russia and China and other people.” Lest this seem like mere campaign rhetoric, just a year later, Trump—no longer a candidate but the commander in chief—told the assembled generals and admirals of the defense establishment that “America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” He added ominously, “George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, George Bush, and others all used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace.”
The administration is now in court seeking authority to deploy the National Guard at any spot the president proclaims to be in “rebellion.” And Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against dancing frogs and other First Amendment protests, which would allow him to deploy heavily armed regular troops on city streets. This may seem like preparation for a red vs. blue civil war, but he is also gearing up to deploy in red states. Those red states have blue cities that are also filled with enemies within who don’t support him.
And once the Democrats are conquered, there will be the RINOS. After that, who knows?
The important thing about Trump is that he lacks aims or plans. What drives him are tropisms, relentless unconscious movements like those of a heliotrope turning toward the sun. Trump cabinet meetings offer clinical proof that there is not enough love and worship in the universe to fill the gaping hole in his psyche. The man is an ocean of need; no victory is enough. There will always be enemies.
Since October 18, Trump has done something no one has done since the British burned Washington in 1814; he has gleefully depicted himself doing to peaceful Americans what the Japanese empire in 1941 did to Pearl Harbor; and he has demanded the kind of reparations that the Allies extracted from Germany at the end of World War I. (Germany did not finish paying off those World War I reparations until 2010.)
That Trump is at war with the country—with all of us—lies in plain sight. On January 6, 2021, his army of brigands attacked the U.S. government in his name. They sought to destroy its government and replace it with a Trump dictatorship.
Trump pardoned the traitors.
His war of conquest has just begun. He may need them again.
The post Trump is a Wartime President appeared first on Washington Monthly.
