Following a week of disappointments, the president-elect tried to salvage his dignity by threatening Panama.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
There is perhaps nothing Donald Trump hates as much as looking weak and being a loser, so it’s safe to assume that he didn’t have the best week.
His biggest loss came on Friday, when House Republicans didn’t do his bidding and left out a debt ceiling increase that Trump wanted to be part of the legislation that kept the government open until March.
That one is going to sting for multiple reasons: First of all, the president-elect is not used to GOP lawmakers defying him so openly. Trump even threatened them with getting primaried if they voted for a “clean” continuing resolution, and yet 170 of them did so.
It didn’t help that Republicans also seemed to be more afraid of Elon Musk, who got what he wanted out of the spending fight (or that people kept referring to the owner of X as the real president of the United States).
In addition, since they failed to raise the debt ceiling right now (or eliminate it altogether), Congress will have to do so next year when Trump is in the Oval Office. At that time, even people who haven’t been paying attention will realize that he isn’t a fiscal conservative and that he will pile trillions of dollars onto the debt.
Finally, when that fight happens, it won’t be good for Republicans in general because enough of them are principled enough to make it necessary for GOP leaders to get some Democratic support, which will have to come at a cost.
Another sign of weakness is that Trump couldn’t get his daughter-in-law Lara Trump installed as Florida’s next senator. When Marco Rubio, the man currently serving as the state’s senior senator, is confirmed as secretary of state, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will get to pick a temporary replacement, and Lara Trump was considered a favorite to get that appointment.
After all, her father-in-law previously got her a position as co-chair of the Republican Party, and the governor was brought to heel after losing to Trump in the GOP primary.
However, Lara Trump announced on Saturday that she had decided to remove her name from consideration, which means that she had either been informed that DeSantis was going to pick somebody else, or she is working on some kind of Trumpian scheme to enrich herself in another way.
Whatever the real reason is, it certainly looks as though the incoming president is weakened… and he won’t have a family member under his direct control in the Senate.
So, what does a bully do after taking some losses? He picks on somebody smaller.
And that’s what Trump did Saturday, when he threatened Panama. Suggesting that the Central American country did not hold up its end of the deal that granted it control over the Panama Canal, the president-elect said he may “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.” It’s worth noting that the canal is a 51-mile waterway that cannot be “returned” (but, presumably, Trump meant control of the canal).
The incoming president has always fantasized of territorial expansion (from acquiring Greenland to annexing Canada), but this plan is so asinine that most news outlets didn’t bother covering apart from a “grandpa is yelling at clouds” kind of way.
And that may be the thing Trump fears the most: that people stop paying attention to him.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
