Behold our Ozymandias
“A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates tha...