And I’m not just referring to the week’s crisis over Greenland and the future of the NATO alliance, a crisis which began and (sort of) ended with many words being uttered by Trump about his “psychological” need to own the vast and strategically located Danish territory. Consider, for example, trump’s “board of Peace,” which he débuted before leaving Davos on Thursday morning.In Trump 1.0, perhaps this would have been no more than one of his Twitter controversies, in which he posted some crazy graphic of himself leading a rump group of world powers to overthrow the United Nations as the new permanent chairman of the global board of directors. In Trump 2.0, his alternate reality is not just a social-media post or the subject of an over-my-dead-body fight with his latest panicked national security adviser but an in-person photo op featuring the President, a real-life logo copied from the U.N.’s, and a random assortment of world leaders who were willing to buy a seat on Trump’s commitee for a cool billion dollars. (Belarus and Qatar, yes; Britain, France, Germany, and every other major U.S. ally in Europe, no.) I highly recommend watching the fully live-streamed event, a show one might caption “Donald Trump and his pretend League of (Lesser) Superheroes, with himself as a bizarro Superman in charge of the world.”
My favorite moment was when—after bragging about how “everybody wants to be a part of” the board that every other major world leader, with the possible exception of the war-mongering pariah Vladimir Putin, refused to join—he claimed that the group he himself had dreamed up was some distinguished independent association that had solicited his chairmanship. “I was very honored when they asked me to do it,” he said. For all I know, he believed it.
perhaps just as revealing, when trump reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was such an astonishing peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”
A decade into the Trump era, Americans are more or less used to this manic political performance art, proof, if we still needed it, that millions of our fellow-citizens are all right with having a clearly disturbed leader who cannot control what he says. (Although, to be fair, even some partisan Republicans are starting to worry that they could pay a
