Trump returns — and
so does his astounding ignorance
If you feel off-kilter,
you’re in good company. The president seems downright bewildered.
Today
at 7:30 a.m. EST
“I think we’re going to do things that people would be
shocked at,” President Donald Trump declared on his second day in
office. It was one of the few true things he said all week.
The crush of vindictive, cruel, unconstitutional and
just plain bonkers orders and actions coming from the restored Trump
administration in its first week makes even the worst-case predictions look
conservative. But if you’re feeling knocked off-kilter by the fire hose of bad
policies, well, you’re in good company. Trump himself seems downright
bewildered.
In the weeks before he became commander in chief, Trump
aimed his fire at the traditional enemies of the United States: Canada, Denmark
and Panama. But upon taking the oath of office, he launched verbal hostilities
against a new foe: the Kingdom of Spain.
On his first evening back in office, Trump invited
reporters into the Oval Office, where he discussed his new decree that NATO
members must spend 5 percent of their nation’s wealth on
their militaries. (He perhaps is unaware that the United States spends only
about 3 percent and would have to come up with another $500 billion annually to
fulfill his edict.) Complaining about the “very low” military spending of
Spain, Trump told his questioners: “They’re a BRICS nation, Spain. You know
what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out.” The 47th president then said
that he would “put at least 100 percent tariff on the business they do with the
United States.”
Spain, part of the European Union, is not a member of the “BRICS” bloc, short for
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (but which, curiously, also
includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates). But
this, apparently, is news to our belligerent president. The United States might
not have been in a conflict with Spain since 1898, but Trump is not one to let
bygones be bygones. Remember the Maine! “I don’t know if the affirmation made
by President Trump was the result of a mix-up or not,” said a spokeswoman for the unnerved Spanish government.
Maybe he’ll “figure it out.”
During that same session in the Oval Office, a reporter
asked Trump whether his executive order governing “unlawful disclosure by
federal officials” was related to Hunter Biden.
“No, I think it’s just more general than that. It’s not
Hunter Biden,” came Trump’s breezy reply. The actual text of the order Trump
signed says otherwise: It strips security clearances
from former officials who issued “a letter discrediting the reporting that
President Joseph R. Biden’s son had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair
business.”
The next evening brought more astounding ignorance from
the chief executive. This time, he brought reporters into the Roosevelt Room to
unveil a supposed $500 billion joint venture regarding artificial intelligence.
But the ruse was exposed by none other than Trump sidekick Elon Musk, who
proclaimed: “They don’t have the money.”
At the event, NBC News’s Peter Alexander asked Trump
about why he had just pardoned D.J. Rodriguez, who shocked a police officer
with a stun gun at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and later boasted that he
“tazzzzed the f--- out of the blue.” The judge who sentenced Rodriguez to more
than 12 years called him a “one-man army of hate, attacking police.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “Was it a pardon?”
Alexander reiterated that it was.
“Okay. Well, we’ll take a look at everything,” Trump
said, though his pardons of this and other cop-beaters are irrevocable.
Trump soon moved on to demanding that California “turn
the valve” to allow more water to reach Los Angeles, where, he said, residents
of Beverly Hills have been limited to 38 gallons of water per day. “When you’re
a rich person, you like to take a shower. Thirty-eight gallons doesn’t last
very long.”
There is no such “valve,” and no such water restrictions in Beverly Hills.
But Trump skipped merrily from that error to another: Addressing a controversy
that has split his staff members, he explained that he supports the H1-B visa
program because it allows his properties to hire “maître d’s, wine experts,
even waiters.” Thus did he apparently confuse the H1-B visa, covering those
with technical expertise, with the H2-B, covering temporary workers.
Trump continued on, scolding the Biden administration
for failing to negotiate a release of the hostages from Gaza “a year and a
half, two years ago.” Good point! Biden should have secured the hostages’
freedom before they were taken captive on Oct. 7, 2023.
By Wednesday night, when Trump appeared from the Oval
Office on Fox News with Sean Hannity, the president was reviving his first-term
canard about raking the forest to prevent fires. “You have to clean
the floors of the forest,” he explained.
And by Thursday afternoon, the perplexed president
seemed unaware that his administration was preparing to send around 10,000
troops to the southern border, as described in a U.S. Customs and Border
Protection briefing document obtained by The Post.
“The southern border?” Trump replied when a reporter
asked him about the plan. He then repeated an unrelated fiction he had offered
earlier about offering 10,000 troops to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s going to be a long four years.
The evidence that Donald Trump was truly, madly and
deeply confused was worrisome when he was a candidate. It’s all the more so now
that he is wielding the mighty apparatus of the U.S. government to pursue his
fantasies. This is a classic case of garbage in, garbage out — but now he is
making the country a landfill for his nonsensical policies.
Those 10,000 troops are being sent to the southern
border to resolve a self-proclaimed “emergency,” even though illegal border
crossings are lower now than when he left office in 2021.
His administration has ordered personnel repurposed from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to
support the same fabricated emergency, needlessly raising the danger of a
terrorist attack. He declared another “national emergency” because of the
“precariously inadequate” energy supply — even though domestic crude-oil
production hit record highs under Biden and is still climbing. He’s refusing to
implement a law banning TikTok, ignoring the threat to national security
because “We won the young vote. I think I won it through TikTok.” (He lost
among young voters, but never mind.)
Most ominous of all is that Trump is already back to
making life-and-death decisions based on his whims. He had said he would pardon
those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, on a “case by case” basis, and
Vice President JD Vance had said that
“if you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Yet
Trump issued a blanket pardon, including to many of those who assaulted police.
Why? A Trump adviser told Axios that, as Trump’s team was debating the issue, “Trump just said: ‘F--- it: Release ’em all.’”
MAGA diehards love the chaos. Others who voted for
Trump might feel, not for the last time, that they were sold a bill of goods.
They wanted law and order and instead got a president blessing violence against
police. They wanted a crackdown on illegal immigration and instead got a
president turning away law-abiding migrants who waited in line for a chance to
claim asylum. They believed Trump’s promises that he would bring peace to Gaza
and end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. But now, he says that he’s “not confident”
about the Gaza ceasefire (“It’s not our war”), and admits that “I don’t know”
whether Russian leader Vladimir Putin wants to resolve the Ukraine conflict.
Above all, Trump supporters voted for a president who
would remember the “forgotten man and woman” of the working class. Instead,
they elected one who seated the oligarchs — Musk, Jeff Bezos (who owns The
Post), Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew — at
his inauguration in front of his own Cabinet nominees. The next day, Trump,
joined at the White House by three more billionaires, extolled the corrupt era
of the robber barons, “when our country was at its richest.” (It wasn’t.) The forgotten man can also forget
about disaster relief: Trump suggested to Hannity on Wednesday night that “FEMA
is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see
the states take care of their own problems.”
Oh, and as for Trump’s promise to reduce prices for
Americans? He issued a vague and meaningless executive order proclaiming that
agencies should “deliver emergency price relief.” Problem solved!
As Trump went on and on Wednesday night about his lust
for retribution against Biden, Hannity tried to interrupt: “Let me get to the
economy. I’m running out of time.”
“I don’t care,” Trump replied. “This is more important.”
No one should be surprised that Trump is pulling out of
the Paris climate accord, kicking career civil servants to the curb,
threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico (but only 10
percent against China), halting civil-rights litigation, dismantling privacy safeguards, attacking
anything that has to do with transgender people or racial diversity, muzzling
public health agencies, ripping up environmental protections (“I’d like to see
federal lands opened up for data centers”), and generally proceeding through
the Project 2025 playbook. He signaled this clearly during the campaign.
But the brazen lawlessness is another matter: declaring
the 14th Amendment to the Constitution null and void by executive fiat;
disparaging the Reagan-appointed judge who blocked Trump’s “blatantly
unconstitutional” order; proclaiming that another executive order gives him
“the right” to ignore the TikTok ban, duly enacted and upheld by the Supreme
Court; asserting that his unilateral declaration of a national energy emergency
“means you can do whatever you have to do”; authorizing immigration raids in churches
and other houses of worship; revealing the nation’s secrets to people who haven’t been vetted; and, of course,
the blanket pardoning and commutations of sentences for people who attacked
police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, and orchestrated the sacking of the Capitol.
Dashed already are any vain hopes that Trump might
temper the worst excesses of his first term. He’s teasing a revenge prosecution
of Biden and proposing his political opponents go “through four years of hell”
as he supposedly did. Executive orders titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government”
and “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”
are road maps for retribution, dubbed “remedial actions,” for agencies’
official conduct “over the last four years.” Petty vindictiveness has begun.
The Pentagon removed the official portrait of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Trump critic. Trump stripped the
security clearance of another critic, his former national security adviser John
Bolton, explaining that Bolton is “a very dumb person” and “a warmonger.” He
eliminated security details for Bolton and other former aides who face ongoing
assassination threats from Iran.
The megalomania is back. “I was saved by God to make
America great again,”
Trump said during his inaugural address, after Franklin
Graham, in his invocation, attributed Trump’s victory to “what God has done.”
So is the infighting. Musk this week forced out Vivek Ramaswamy, his co-leader of the
ersatz “Department of Government Efficiency.” Trump loyalist Steve Bannon
renewed his feud with Musk, calling on White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles
to “sit him down.” (In the unlikely event she succeeds at that, she might ask Musk
to cease greeting Trump supporters with the extended-arm salute he offered them on
Monday.)
Returned, as well, is the dark talk (“vicious, violent
… radical and corrupt … stumbling … catastrophic … horrible betrayals”) and the
gratuitous insults, some now delivered from behind the Resolute Desk. Liz
Cheney is a “crying lunatic.” Adam Schiff is “scum.” Jack Smith is “deranged.”
Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell” for Jan. 6. After the Episcopal bishop of
Washington, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, had the temerity at the National
Prayer Service to urge Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country
who are scared now,” Trump lashed out at the “so-called Bishop” who is “a
Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” not to mention “nasty” and “boring.”
Trump’s tired claims, about the “rigged” 2020 election
and the FBI’s purported culpability for Jan. 6, have come with him back
to Washington, as have his self-enrichment schemes. Asked about the several
billion dollars he has amassed in recent days for the cryptocurrency “meme coins” he released,
Trump, flanked by moguls Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son,
responded: “Several billion? That’s peanuts for these guys.”
And all of this is being normalized, far faster than
during Trump’s first term. Stunned Democrats have yet to find their collective
voice. And Republicans are bowing and scraping before Trump. On Wednesday,
House Speaker Mike Johnson labeled as “disgusting” Biden’s preemptive pardons
protecting likely targets of Trump’s prosecution vendettas. But as for Trump’s
pardoning of cop beaters, Johnson replied: “The president’s made his decision.
I don’t second-guess those.”
The most unwelcome feature of Trump’s return this week,
more than any individual action, is his abiding ignorance, even after all these
years. This is what allows unscrupulous figures such as Stephen Miller to run
amok. It’s also the source of the constant chaos that is Trump’s trademark.
This week alone, Trump botched — either out of
ignorance or mendacity — claims about World Health Organization funding,
the trade deficit, opioid deaths, inflation, birthright citizenship, Biden’s
pardons, illegal immigration, the Jan. 6 committee and more. In a typical
pronouncement, Trump alleged that no president imposed tariffs on China “until
I came along.” George Washington would beg
to differ.
With such faulty inputs, it’s no wonder the outputs are
defective. “With my actions today,” Trump said on Monday, “we will end the
Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate” — neither of
which actually exists. The same order promises to
“safeguard” Americans’ access to inefficient appliances and plumbing fixtures. He
justified his threats to retake the Panama Canal, possibly by force, by saying
38,000 Americans died building it and that “China is operating the Panama
Canal.” Fewer than 6,000 Americans were believed to have died, and China does not operate the canal. The White
House, justifying its order requiring full-time, in-person work by federal
employees, claimed that “only 6 percent of employees currently work in person.”
But the Office of Management and Budget found that half of federal workers
don’t even qualify to work remotely, and the rest average three days a week in
the office.
And then there was the executive order titled
“Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”
Restoring names? The order proposes to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” — even though it has
been called the Gulf of Mexico since Spanish explorers mapped it — in 1519.
Their hostile act was a grave insult to the future
United States. And that is why, 506 years later, Trump is finally taking Spain
for the mortal enemy it is.
