To be fair, militaries come up with war plans for everyone, even allies, and likely weird shit like “what if aliens invade.” (It’s just that, the less likely the scenario, the less time and effort are put into planning it out.)
Trump frequently gives himself away like this. I recollect previous instances where Trump simultaneously asserted that something was a complete fabrication but also that the press should be prosecuted for revealing secret/private information.
The thing about Trump is, he doesn’t want to be president - what he wants is attention and adulation, and being president gives him that; the actual job of being president is a real drag, and he does as little of that as possible (i.e. pretty much none).
Weird what happens when you replace competent people with unqualified, pro-war crime, white supremacist, alcoholic rapists who don’t feel a need to follow any laws.
It’s nice to see the reckless stupidity here, even if it is, ultimately, harmful to the country. The fascism is also harmful, but the reckless stupidity makes them self-defeating.
Given that Trump doesn’t have any other foreign policy tools in his toolbox, it’s only a matter of time. At some point Trump is going to realize that when you fight a trade war, the more countries you’re fighting against, the worst it goes for you. When it’s you against the entire world, it really doesn’t go well. (I don’t know if Trump has a wildly inflated sense of the US’s economic power, or he’s just a big baby who wants to lash out and doesn’t care what impact it has on the country. Probably both.)
I was just thinking about his whole reflexive impositions of tariffs, relative to Venezuela. A normal president, if a country was doing something objectionable, would coordinate with other heads of state to impose some sort of sanctions or punishment that worked because they were united. Trump can’t remotely do that. He has alienated US allies, is generally incapable of cooperating, and his desire to punish is usually based on personal, unreasonable grievances that other people aren’t going to go along with anyways. Since Trump is also an idiot, all he has is tariffs and blocking people from given countries from coming to the US. That’s it.
