'Unusually weak lame duck' Trump likely to leave office a 'pariah': analysis
Although President-elect Donald Trump is acting invincible ahead of his second term, progressive writer Brian Beutler believes that overconfidence masks an "unusually weak" political position that he believes Democrats would be foolish to ignore.
Writing on his Off Message website, Beutler argues that corporate CEOs such as Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos are needlessly groveling before the president-elect when the reality is that his position is highly unlikely to grow stronger in the coming months.
"He’s weak in the ways every lame-duck president is, and, to an under-appreciated extent, his efforts to menace and extort concessions out of domestic and international rivals is a form of rebellion against his own expiration date, his looming irrelevance," argues Beutler.
Further, he argues, Trump is a real risk of dying a "pariah" if he "unleashes war or another economic calamity or social collapse, or even just bungles another national emergency," which he believes are "all real possibilities."
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All of this, he wrote, gives Democrats a golden opportunity to simply make Trump look small and weak on a global stage even as he tries to bully longtime allies such as Denmark and Canada.
"If there’s an ambitious, vain liberal out there who wants to be president, that person should appoint themselves Trump’s daily troll," he implores. "How’s Greenland coming along? As good as the wall? Oh you’re going to run for a third term? At 82? Sounds great. Since the rules are out the window, maybe Barack Obama wants to run again! If so, we’ll clear the field for him."
He implores Democrats to do this for no other reason that it would simply feel good.
"Everyone with something at stake in this coming term should look around and ask themselves whether they’d feel better if they comported themselves like Claudia Sheinbaum or Jeff Bezos," he writes. "Or Mark Zuckerberg. Like someone with dignity or like an embarrassing beta who ritually emasculates himself (not all at once but slice by slice, inch by inch, in exchange for nothing)."