One Year Under America’s First Mad King
Trump’s second administration has caused enormous damage fulfilling the president’s absurd whims and petty grievances. Three years to go.
In just one year of his second term in office, Donald Trump and his party have unleashed a breathtakingly depraved spree of authoritarianism, violence, racism, corruption, abuse, and scandal. But what has made Trump’s second presidency so uniquely Trumpian is how everybody in the ruling party’s elite seems to know that they – and therefore the nation – are all at the mercy of the sudden whims of a mad-king leader. And the entirety of the GOP is just… going with it, as they simultaneously beg for more.
Last year, some in the Trump White House began joking that this president was turning the place into “MAGA-Saddam’s presidential palace,” likening the gold gilding to the decadence of the late Iraqi dictator whose sadistic brutality Trump has so admired. Within a short year back in power, the twice-impeached, convicted-felon president has erected a federalized personality cult, attempted to rule by executive fiat, and prioritized his personal vendettas and crank grievances when making policy in a manner so debauched that it would make the deceased, genocidal Saddam Hussein blush.
And when the late Iraqi ruler threatened an invasion of another sovereign country, his reasons at least made more sense than Trump’s threats against Greenland. When Trump speaks of seizing Greenland and his rage at the Europeans, he reminds some of his own staff of a toddler clothed in imperial power. “You will not be able to get through to him. It’s easier to explain it to my children, who are young,” says one senior administration official, who has talked to the president about how Norway’s government had no power to award him the Nobel Peace Prize last year.