Onward to CanaDon!

Bulletins from a French butcher's shop

Everyone and his dog has had a blogging go at Trump and Venezuela this weekend, so I’ll save you a learned exposition on American adventures in Latin America, despite my extensive experience of treachery, deceit and idiocy in the region.

I’ve written here before of the time the Daily Telegraph sent me to El Salvador by mistake; of the aftermath of the American invasion of Grenada; and I dare say one day I’ll get round to writing about one of my finer journalistic hours, when I exposed some risible CIA nonsense during Ronald Reagan’s murky pursuit of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

What interests me right now is the future, not the past, and I ought to begin by offering my congratulations to The Donald: no president in American history has succeeded in changing a potentially embarrassing subject as often or as dramatically as Mr Trump, and this weekend he excelled himself. Epstein you say? Rising prices? Whisperings of MAGA revolt?

Screw all that, let’s invade Venezuela! (Never mind that Don himself was always the first to warn us of politicians desperate to distract - this tweet from 2012):

Congrats nonetheless to the Delta Force heavies who pulled off the Maduro heist – no tears will be shed for that vicious Caracas conman here. Don, too, deserves the briefest of nods for daring to let his dogs of war loose. Anyone remember the Disaster in the Desert of April 1980, when Jimmy Carter’s flailing efforts to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis ended in colliding helicopters and US military ignominy? Caracas could easily have gone sideways. But it didn’t and Trump now bestrides the globe.

Many wise pundits are worried that the US president’s reckless enthusiasm for moving fast and breaking things will encourage China to seize Taiwan, or Putin to advance deeper into Ukraine. I’ve always tended to leave wisdom to others; my own view is that China and Russia are quite capable of pursuing their own objectives irrespective of anything Trump does or doesn’t do. Trump doesn’t scare them a bit.

The rest of us though, are probably wise to be scared. America’s president has clearly succumbed to the delusions of grandiosity that have preceded the downfall of just about every tyrant you can think of.

The first sign: he wants his name plastered everywhere. He was always an ego maniac, of course, with his Trump golf courses, Trump hotels, Trump casinos and Trump Tower. But now he is turning Washington DC into Trumpsville, with the ink barely dry on the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace’s new business cards and lawsuits flying over the renamed Donald J Trump & John F Kennedy Center. And you can bet your life that one day soon Don will blushingly agree that his proposed new Arch of Triumph, inspired by the Parisian Arc de Triomphe, should be known as the Arc de Trump.

Which makes me wonder: what’s next? We all fear - rightly – for Greenland, which is clearly soon to be renamed Goldland, with promises of a giant new ballroom for Nuuk. Panama and its canal may soon be renamed Panamaga. Will Canada be invaded and renamed CanaDon? Should we be worried about the United KingDon? If you think this is absurd, what do you make of Trump’s play on the Monroe Doctrine, which was first articulated by US President James Monroe in 1823, and was originally intended as a US foreign policy barrier to European colonialism in the Americas?

Trump’s version of Monroe turns the western hemisphere into an all-American playground where nasty foreigners must bow to Washington’s interests. And of course he has taken to calling it the “Donroe Doctrine” – a phrase originally concocted by a New York Post headline writer a year ago and enthusiastically embraced ever since by Trump.

What’s intriguing about all this is how Trump is closing in on the other great obsession of his increasingly random foreign policy (abduct one Latin dictator and accuse him of drug smuggling; offer another drug-smuggling dictator a pardon).

The obsession in question (subdued of late but clearly still latent) is the Kim Il Sung personality cult in North Korea, adopted and extended by Kim’s successor, Kim Jong Il. It’s surely no coincidence that America’s Republican Party increasingly resembles North Korean “Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism” (that’s an official term adopted as “the only guiding idea” of the nation at a Pyongyang party conference in 2012).

I read last week that Donald Trump Jr is being “groomed” as his father’s successor as president, which, whether true or not, tells you more about the fragility of the MAGA coalition and JD Vance’s shaky hold on Trumpian loyalties than it does about Donald Jr.

But it’s beginning to feel like only a matter of time before Trump’s narcissism really jumps the shark and no amount of changing the subject will persuade American voters that their president is a) sane and b) committed to anyone’s prosperity other than his own.

That’s something to look forward to, non?