Donald Trump gave a particularly senile press conference on Tuesday, in which he rambled on and on about international affairs. I saw some political journalists had the audacity to act like the press conference was a referendum on American voters alone, like the entirety of the American media didn’t spend the past four years doing everything they could to ensure that Trump got back into office. First off, Trump claimed that he has the authority to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which is the body of water shared by the US, Mexico and Cuba.
Donald Trump on Tuesday said the United States would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the president-elect seemed to tie the prospective renaming to his long-standing grievances with Mexico’s handling of immigration, drug trafficking and trade.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. “ … What a beautiful name, and it’s appropriate.”
The president-elect subsequently decried the Mexican government for allowing migrants to “pour” into the United States, saying Mexico “can stop them and we’re going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada because Canada, they come through Canada, too.”
News outlets are now busying themselves with trying to figure out if Trump could actually rename it. What’s worse is that I’m sure many people halfway understand his reasoning, but no one cares that much about it to actually make the change. While this was spectacularly unhinged part of his rant, he also doubled-down on his threats to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force.
President-elect Donald J. Trump refused on Tuesday to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal that America built more than a century ago and to push Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.
In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Mr. Trump repeatedly returned to the theme of American sacrifice in building the canal and accused China, falsely, of operating it today. When pressed on the question of whether he might order the military to force Panama to give it up — in violation of treaties and other agreements reached during the Carter administration — or to do the same with Greenland, he said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”
“We need them for economic security — the Panama Canal was built for our military,” he said. Asked again if he would rule out the use of military force, he said: “I’m not going to commit to that. You might have to do something.”
Mr. Trump’s statements propelled his repeated calls for expanding American territory to a new level, one that is bound to roil three American allies — Panama; Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs; and Canada, which he has mocked as America’s “51st State.” On Tuesday he made clear, though, that he was not joking, suggesting that if Canada remained a sovereign state the financial cost to its trading relationship with the United States could be crushing.
I really feel like this man’s brain is Swiss cheese at this point. Something’s got to give, right? Will JD Vance’s handlers allow Trump to “operate” like this for much longer? That was always the conspiracy theory, that wealthy Republican fascists used Trump to attain power, then as soon as he won, they would dispatch with him quickly. Anyway, I’m sure Putin is smiling this week.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
