Presidential Derangement Syndrome
ROGER FITCH ESQ TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2026
The destructive force of Trump's egomania ...Narcissist on the
loose ... Mob boss ... Venezuela - "it's mine" ... Real estate
opportunities for Greenland ... Roger Fitch reports from
Washington
“No president has understood less about what makes America great
than Donald Trump; none has been more ignorant of the post-WWII international
framework that allowed America to remain the premier superpower. In
systematically weakening alliances, frittering away our moral authority,
aligning himself with international dictators, trashing multilateral
organizations, hollowing out the State Department and showing himself to be a
feckless, corrupt bully, he has weakened America’s standing around the world to
a degree no foreign enemy could have achieved. He always puts America Last” – Jennifer
Rubin
“The finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history” –
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
The United States may never recover from the shame of Donald
Trump: the crimes, corruption, vulgarity, the mad egomania. After a year, Americans can feel the physical
weight of Trumpism.
They still can’t get their heads around a violent, unprincipled gang seizing
their government under a deranged Capo, and the US becoming a Mafia state.
Signs of Trump’s narcissistic megalomania are everywhere:
the Orwellian rebranding with Trump’s tainted name of the Institute for Peace
and the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts; naming a new class of (redundant) battleships for
himself; authorising the minting of personalised $1
commemorative coins celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence with Trump on both sides;
displaying Kim-il-Sung-like faces on banners on government buildings; similarly
defacing National Park passes; and, fixing his face on $1 million “gold” and $5 million “platinum” visas to
be forged by the Mint.
As the Atlantic commented,
“He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country
can name for him”, or as Trump said of his $300 million White House ballroom, “I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will”.
Capping it all off, Il Capo shook-down the
latest Nobel Peace Prize winner for her medallion, which he coveted and
believed he should have received. She got to keep the prize money.
As Paul Krugman observed:
“It’s a
Nobel medal, a symbol of the honour, not the honour itself. Only a vain, insecure fool would
imagine that blackmailing someone into handing their medal over adds to his
stature.”
Still, as the New Republic said, think of the “joy of detrumpification” that will
follow the dictator’s fall. Vandalism will be rectified, pathetic graffiti,
scrubbed, sham gold, gone. Buildings and agencies will be restored to their
original names, and hopefully, benign purposes. Coins can be withdrawn and
melted down. Not much can be done about stamps, but the Post Office will likely
not survive Trump.
≈ ≈ ≈
“[Trump is] a stupid, domineering brute who compulsively rips
off everyone he interacts with … It’s been more than a century since wars for
plunder made any economic sense, but for Trump to realize that, he would have
to be capable of rational thought” – Ryan
Cooper, American
Prospect.
“Trump wasn’t seeking regime change … He’s more like a mob boss
trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he
can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take” – Paul Krugman on Trump’s
Venezuelan invasion.
It was only a matter of time till Donald Trump cast his
reptilian eyes on the rest of the world. He decided to begin with murder on the high seas of
defenceless fishermen and sailors, and shipwrecked survivors, who, even if
they were involved in a war (they are not) were hors de combat.
Trump soon added an illegal maritime blockade of
Venezuela (the ostensible target of the small-boat maritime murders) to his
list of international law violations.
The Pentagon has also introduced the ancient war crime of perfidy into its
arsenal: disguising US military planes as civilian aircraft in order to deceive
both “drug-dealing” fisherman and Trump’s maritime piracy targets,
foreign-flagged oil tankers.
All this was followed soon after by the outright invasion of
Venezuela; it wasn’t the first time a corrupt US government had meddled in Venezuela.
Here’s the purported legal justification, an Office of Legal Counsel’s memorandum written
by T Elliot Gaiser, surely a future
Trump judicial appointee.
George H W Bush also invaded a country and captured a head of
state, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, but this time the
kidnap, though involving the deaths of 100 people, left the government of the
overthrown leader in place. David Cole has more on this Vichy Venezuela.
Trump now says international law,
like US law, only applies to him when it coincides with his “morality”; both
domestic and treaty laws are optional. However, under the US constitution,
international treaties such as those Trump is flouting, eg, UN treaties, the Torture
Convention, Geneva Conventions on War, have the force of US law.
A US president has no authority to unilaterally withdraw from
ratified treaties, although George W Bush purported to, as did Trump during his
first term in office.
As Trump soon admitted, he seized Venezuela for the oil, but
as the American Prospect’s Ryan
Cooper observed, given the quality of the country’s oil,
its cost of production and current demand, “Stealing Venezuela’s oil makes no
sense, even – indeed, especially – from the standpoint of American oil
companies”.
Even so, Trump stole the oil, and
the oil companies can’t even recoup losses from past nationalisations: the
confiscated oil is being sold at a
discount to Trump megadonors and the
proceeds (some $500 million so far) deposited into a foreign bank account in
Trump-friendly Qatar where, presumably, only the Thief-in-Chief has access.
There’s no lawful authority, except an invalid purported Executive Order.
Perhaps Cooper overlooked the desirability of such a fund for
collateral on future real estate ventures of the
Trump Organisation and Jarrod Kushner in the Middle-East and elsewhere.
As for the Venezuelan caper, Mother Jones reported on another cui
bono, i.e, the vulture capitalist and Trump benefactor Paul Singer. Thanks to the corrupt
president’s intervention in Venezuela, Singer is poised to reap windfall billions from his
bargain sale purchase of the bankrupt American arm of the Venezuelan state oil
company Citgo.
≈ ≈ ≈
Trump wants Greenland, ignoring a 1917 treaty with Denmark. It’s war, if he doesn’t get his peace prize
Why Greenland, besides the many Trump donors investing there?
“I’m in real
estate … I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building
that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps.
And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be
part of the United States … It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s
just a little bit larger” – Trump, in a 2021 conversation with
journalists Susan Glaser (New Yorker) and Peter Baker (NY Times).
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