A conservative columnist is sounding the alarm that red states face devastating consequences from President Trump's increasingly unpredictable behavior on the world stage.
The fiasco began with Trump's middle-of-the-night social media tirades demanding Denmark cede Greenland, a move that led European troops to flood the territory. European leaders have threatened hundreds of billions in retaliatory tariffs specifically targeting industries in Trump-backing red states.
After a "rambling, sometimes incoherent" press conference, columnist David Mastio, a former speechwriter for the George W. Bush administration, argued Trump, like Joe Biden before him, would be better suited elsewhere than the White House.
"What’s clear is that a president with a penchant for memory lapses and afternoon naps is far less dangerous than a president who would blithely alter a 75-year-old security treaty with 2 a.m. social media posts," chided Mastio.
The chaos has sparked unprecedented concern among normally loyal Republicans. U.S. Naval War College expert Tom Nichols described the presser as "completely random 45 minutes of slushy mumbling," while GOP Sen. Roger Marshall admitted Trump is "almost trolling here" regarding Federal Reserve investigations.
"Stable presidents don’t troll and they don’t threaten to attack allies. Indeed, talk of Trump’s infirmity is spurring hopeful talk of a 25th Amendment solution and impeachment, as if enough people in Trump’s obsequious Cabinet or the rubber-stamp Congress would dare act against the president," said Mastio.
Trump claims he passed a dementia test at Walter Reed, though he appeared confused about its purpose, calling it "a very hard IQ test." Mastio railed that Trump's "behavior shows he is far from stable," but admitted the president has defied predictions of political doom before. As he threatens to destroy the 75-year-old NATO alliance, Europeans are organizing FIFA World Cup boycotts and calculating tariff responses that could devastate agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
And two red states would pay.
"Now chatter on European social media and in the local press there threatens to bring Trump’s incoherence home to Kansas City as Europeans call for a boycott of the FIFA World Cup, and European leaders ponder hundreds of billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs targeted at industries in Trump-backing red states such as Kansas and Missouri," Mastio complained.
