Last week's Trumpian agenda included a repeat of what has unfortunately become a recurring image: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte paying homage to the US president. This time the setting was the Oval Office, but the topic of the meeting was once again the same: setting NATO member states' arms spending at 5% of their GDP, an obscenity intended only to please the voracity of the arms industry, of which Trump has always been a staunch defender. The conversation included a sort of digression, a disjointed and unfinished sentence like many Trump utters, about the need to punish Spain with retaliation for not having accepted the increase in arms spending: "It would be easy... You know..."
The next day, Steve Bannon – a global far-right guru and one of the architects of the MAGA movement – declared to The Economist that Trump is "an instrument of divine providence" and that they are working—conspiring—to ensure he can have a third term, despite the American Constitution's explicit prohibition in its Twenty-Second Amendment. "We need him," Bannon asserts. This is a serious but not unusual fact: despots and tyrants eventually identify themselves with divinity and consequently proclaim themselves necessary, indispensable, irreplaceable. And eternal, naturally. Trump is now seventy-nine years old: if he were to manage to string together a third term with his current second, he would be eighty-six by the end of them. If he adds a fourth term (why not?), he would reach ninety in power.
In his first term, Trump failed to achieve what he truly desires: to have literally everyone—from his closest aides to world leaders, including the stock markets, the press, and global powers—live in suspense and fear of his every move. His every whim.They kiss my ass": this, and nothing else, is his conception of power. If Trump, instead of Machiavelli, had to write The Prince, the treatise on political philosophy would most likely be condensed into these five words: "Kiss my ass."
Erratic, fickle, childish in the most irritating sense of the word. The international community simply should not accept living under the dictates of a man who displays signs of senility similar to those he criticized his adversary Joe Biden for, but in his case, tinged with Caesarian fickleness. Trump often speaks and acts clown-like, but his clowning translates into social ruptures, economic collapse, population displacement, or war crimes. He doesn't care less about turning the East Wing of the White House into a 9,000-square-meter discotheque than he does about a video of himself dropping feces from a fighter jet on protesters.No kings", how to attack the Constitution or the Capitol. A despot is always a tragedy for the people who must suffer it; a global despot is an unacceptable burden for humanity.
