Our Megalomaniacal President

Trump has always been a narcissist. But it’s gotten much worse.

More headlines from the disaster zone:

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, said he personally thanked President Trump on Saturday night for issuing a pardon that cut short the 22-year prison term he was serving in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Tarrio’s expression of gratitude came during a brief but extraordinary encounter with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Tarrio and his mother, Zuny Duarte, were invited to have dinner at the property by one of its members.

Happy Monday

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President Trump shared an AI generated image of himself as pope which some consider to be a sign he’s an Antichrist and honestly they might be right (Composite / Photos: Whitehouse on X / Shutterstock)

The Department-Store God-King

by William Kristol

Why is Donald Trump’s second term so much more dangerous than his first?

There are several reasons, but here are two.

The first: Trump is worse than he was eight years ago. The second: Those around him now are worse than those around him then.

Trump has always been a narcissist. But what do you call it when success and power go to a narcissist’s head? Megalomania?

As Trump said in his recent interview with the Atlantic: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys . . . And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Now, most presidents wouldn’t say in the first place that they “run the country.” They might recognize that other branches of government play a role, and that other national institutions matter. They might grasp the fact that this is a free country, not one the president “runs.”

So the narcissism is jarring. But Trump’s self-described progression from “I run the country” to “I run the country and the world” seems to represent a progression from narcissism to megalomania. Running the world sounds . . . God-like.

Tariffs are one of the miraculous ways that Trump believes will enable him to run the world. As he explained to Time magazine:

You have to understand . . . I’ve made all the deals. . . . The deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. . . . So I will set a price.

What an image: The United States as Trump’s department store. It’s a store where he sets the prices, where neither Congress nor companies nor markets nor other countries have any say. It’s all him.

President Trump: the God-King CEO of the universal department store. It’s a vulgar Trumpian picture. It’s a picture of untrammeled power. It’s a narcissistic vision. It’s also a megalomaniacal one.

And let’s not forget the military parade planned for June 14, which providentially happens to be both Trump’s birthday and the birthday of the United States Army. The Army had planned a reasonably modest 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall. Trump is now demanding a large military parade—we must assume with the commander-in-chief looking down from on high on the reviewing stand.

And then there’s Trump’s oft-expressed wish to retake the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland—and for that matter Canada. Trump realizes that territorial expansion is a mark of a certain kind of powerful national leader.

Then there’s the matter of Trump’s aides. The people around Trump this time are far more sycophantic and far more authoritarian than those with him eight years ago.

Early in Trump’s first term it was the crazed Michael Flynn who was purged and Steve Bannon who was stopped from attending NSC meetings. In the second term, it’s the relatively sane Mike Waltz who is purged and Stephen Miller who attends NSC meetings. And Miller is now a strong candidate to become national security advisor, as Trump himself has confirmed.

In the first term, the relatively normal types prevailed for at least for a while in the internal struggles. For much of that term those aides and cabinet secretaries constrained a narcissistic Trump.

In the second term, we have sycophants like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Marco Rubio prostrating themselves before the megalomaniacal Trump. And we have authoritarians like Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Kash Patel encouraging Trump to even greater dreams of omnipotence.

We have a megalomaniac surrounded by sycophants and authoritarians.

This will not end well.

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The Shiny-Objects Presidency

by Andrew Egger

Last Thursday, I wrote about Trump’s “crown-on, crown-off” routine: styling himself emperor of the universe one minute, insisting major questions about White House policy are above his pay grade the next. Over the weekend, we got another whopper in this department, courtesy of Trump’s Sunday interview with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press.

Does Trump think everyone in the United States deserves due process? “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much, right? “I don’t know,” the president repeated, adding that “it might say that” before going into a now-standard jag about the infeasibility of giving millions of migrants “trials.”¹

Welker pressed further: “But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”

“I don’t know,” Trump again replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.”

Leave aside for the moment Trump’s nonchalant apathy toward the Constitution—which, while appalling, should by now come as a surprise to exactly nobody. Zero in on the last statement: “What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said.”

What Trump is discussing here is one of the signature policies of his administration: the El Salvador deportation regime that is building to a profound, decisive standoff between him and the federal courts. When Trump discusses that battle, as here, does he speak like the field general of his faction? Or does he sound more like someone who read about the conflict in passing on the news?

This is becoming a remarkably common pattern. Trump will discuss what seems for all the world like central presidential initiatives in a way that suggests he’s barely paying attention to them. Elon Musk’s DOGE goes on a rampage firing federal workers, and Trump is at best dimly aware: “If you don’t answer,” Trump said in February of Musk’s “five things you did” email initiative, “you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired.” The Supreme Court upholds a lower-court ruling demanding Trump “facilitate” a migrant’s return from El Salvador, and a few days later Trump needs Stephen Miller to jog his memory: “What was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve, was it nine to nothing? In our favor?”

Get a little deeper in the weeds, and all bets are off. Asked last night about “his” effort to dismantle the World Trade Center Health Program—as written in the paper Trump religiously reads—Trump seemed dumbfounded. “I’m not aware of anything that may have been brought up,” he told the pool.

What is Trump paying attention to? That’s obvious enough: His endless procession of cockamamie idea-of-the-minute pronouncements. Open Truth Social any time, day or night, for the public ruminations of a guy who has a remarkable amount of brainstorming time on his hands. This weekend’s output was typical: The United States will rebuild and reopen Alcatraz. The adminstration will place a 100 percent tariff on movies “produced in Foreign Lands.” How can Trump pay attention to the main work of his administration when he’s busy planning himself a military parade and negotiating for D.C. to host the 2027 NFL draft—perhaps on the national mall?

Lots of people brush off these sorts of things as “distractions”—shiny objects Trump dangles to keep us preoccupied while he diabolically goes about the quiet, evil work of the administration. More and more I wonder whether we’ve got it backwards. There’s plenty of diabolical work being done, but Trump is happy to hand that off to the lackeys. These days, the main person Trump is interested in distracting is himself.

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Cinéma Tariffé

by Sonny Bunch

Late last night, Donald Trump announced that he wanted his goons to immediately work on implementing a 100 percent tariff on films made out of the country because, of course, Great Britain providing tax credits to secure production of Jurassic World: Rebirth is a “National Security threat.” This led to about a dozen different people sending me Trump’s Truth Social message with captions that ranged from “lol” to “wtf.”

And indeed, there’s little to do but laugh and curse, because no one has any fucking idea what a “100 percent Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands” actually means. Is it a tariff on the entire budget of the movie? Is it a tariff on the tax rebates secured from other nations? Is it a tariff on every ticket sold? Maybe? Maybe not. Who knows! Onetime Amazon Studios chief Roy Price highlighted a bunch of very obvious questions about this scheme, such as what even qualifies as a “film” in the age of streaming. No matter: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick claimed to be “on it.” I’m sure he’ll come up with something really great.

If one were looking at this cynically, they might suggest that the whole ploy is simply an effort to hurt an industry that is notoriously anti-Trump. Because no matter how this gets enacted—either by making production more expensive via insane taxation or by making tickets more expensive for consumers—it’ll hurt the movie industry. And that, in turn, will hurt movie production and exhibition, a business that employs millions of Americans.

The economic case for movie tariffs is nonexistent, even according to Trump’s own mental model of tariffs as a way to reduce trade deficits: As the Wall Street Journal noted last night, the Motion Picture Association reported that the American film industry had a $15.3 billion trade surplus in 2023 and did not have a trade deficit with any of the major foreign markets.

The irony of all this is that the American film industry is so dominant already that other nations literally pay Hollywood studios to come to their countries and make movies. Great Britain needs to entice American filmmakers to come make big budget movies because American films are big and British films are small. I wouldn’t be opposed to America (and America’s cities and states) getting more competitive on the tax rebate front in order to lure studios back to the United States. But this is the worst and dumbest possible way to go about it, one that will only lead to fewer and smaller productions with fewer people employed.

But then, “The Worst And Dumbest Way” would be a great tagline for Trump 2: Tariff Boogaloo.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump’s Sunday Night Brain Dump Will Leave Your Jaw on the Floor... While some of us were watching playoff sports, SAM STEIN and ANDREW EGGER teamed up to dissect the big guy’s Sunday night musings on Alcatraz, foreign films, and the NFL draft.

• What RFK Jr. Doesn’t Understand About Disability... The HHS secretary’s ignorance of the political history of disability shows he is the last person who should have a role in shaping its future, writes IVAN PLIS.

• Trump’s Bumbling, Bullying Anti-DEI Crusade... The administration’s culture warriors get triggered by mentions of race or gender, reports CATHY YOUNG, who brings the receipts.

• Sen. Angus King Sounds the Alarm on Trump... The Maine independent joins JOHN AVLON on How to Fix It. His ideas: Reasserting checks and balances, restoring trust, and putting country over party. It’s the type of stuff a lot of those guys in the Senate (Paul, Lee, Cruz) used to love. What happened?!

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Quick Hits

SIGNALGATE SPIRALS: So here’s the good news: New reporting suggests top White House officials’ use of the messaging app Signal is not as openly defiant of federal record-keeping laws as many of us had believed.

And here’s the very bad news: They’re making those Signal chats way, way less secure than even their biggest detractors had suspected. In fact, the platform they’re using was hacked. 404 Media reports:

A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.

The White House’s hamfisted inclusion of the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal chat had already shown us that the private app is only ever as secure as its individual participants are careful. But the reporting here suggests a far deeper structural flaw: a copy of all administration Signal discussions logged off-site with far less security than Signal itself offers.

“I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes. It wasn’t much effort at all,” the anonymous hacker told 404 Media. “If I could have found this in less than 30 minutes then anybody else could too. And who knows how long it’s been vulnerable?”

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OUT IN THE OPEN: The scope of the Trump family’s ethically problematic dealmaking is so staggering that it is hard to keep up. But the New York Times tried its hand this morning with a piece documenting the blizzard of deals being conducted by the president’s two eldest sons: crypto ventures, holding companies, high-rise towers, and exclusive clubs. There is even a Bitcoin mining company. All of these have clear conflicts of interests before the government. All of them will likely enrich Donald Trump. The kicker, though, is the defense that the White House offered the paper.

“The president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said. “There are no conflicts of interest.”

Ah, yes, we’re sure there is a sturdy firewall between [checks notes] Donald Trump and Eric. No way they would ever talk shop.

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Cheap Shots

1. I tackled the ludicrousness of this argument, which is premised on the false notion that current law demands full trials for migrants facing deportation, in last Monday’s Morning Shots. Always read Morning Shots, that’s what I say!