President Donald Trump exploded last week when Republican senators voted to limit his war powers as he threatens military action across the globe, and a pair of columnists agreed that was a sign of how deeply he has sunk into delusion.
The Senate passed a resolution last week that would block Trump from using the armed forces against Venezuela unless Congress authorizes it. The president lashed out at five GOP senators by name for daring to challenge his authority, and The New Republic's Greg Sargent discussed the matter with Salon's Amanda Marcotte.
"It does seem to me that he wouldn’t be so mad if he really was not going to just invade Venezuela or Greenland or whoever else he’s just got a hankering to unleash the military forces on," Marcotte said. "But obviously also a huge part of it is that he has decided he’s a king now, that he has unlimited power, that there should be no checks on his power. And like a giant overgrown toddler, he can’t help but freak out if anyone says no to him."
Trump had already been carrying out an illegal war against Venezuela before sending in troops on Jan. 3 to capture Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and Sargent doesn't think legislation will end his aggression.
"There’s no planet on which this measure actually ends up stopping him from doing whatever he wants with the military," Sargent said. "The House isn’t going to pass this thing. And even if the House did pass it, Trump would just veto it. So he’s not going to have his powers limited. He’s waging illegal war on Venezuela in many ways with the boat strikes and with the invasion itself without congressional authority. And he’s going to continue to do that. But the only thing that actually pissed him off is that these five Republicans would dare to question his authority."
The situation inside the White House since the beginning of this year seems to have gotten worse, Marcotte said.
"I'm genuinely worried in a way that is hard to convey," she said. "Because obviously he’s a narcissist. He’s always been a narcissist. But I am genuinely worried that something has changed for the worse in recent weeks, if not months, because the way that Trump and Stephen Miller and all these fools are acting, they seem to be high on their own supply to a degree that I haven’t ever seen before.
"They have really truly convinced themselves that their power is unlimited, that there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop them," Marcotte added. "I think that the success of the Venezuela kidnapping of Maduro ... has convinced them, has gotten into their heads, and they just think there’s nothing that can stop them right now and that there’s no limit, and I find that scary because when somebody in power gets into that mentality, I mean, that’s Gaddafi levels of delusion. That’s bad. That’s like Hitler’s-last-days levels of delusion."
Rather than being a display of strength, Marcotte believes Trump's delusions betray a feeling of weakness.
"I hear somebody who is trying — who is beginning to get — his back is against the wall," Marcotte said. "This is how he acted when he lost the 2020 election. His lies got more and more livid, crazy, louder, bizarre. His back was against the wall. He was losing and he just tried to escalate the tenor of the lies in hopes that that would make up for the facts sort of overcoming him, and I think we’re seeing similar behavior."