This is their long term MO. Their voters are, largely, aggrieved white men, who have been told they’re the victims of women like, having jobs and making dating decisions. Their politicians are perpetual victims of “mean” or “nasty” opposition. Their policies will fix all your problems, that we’re all caused by the other team.
Everything is grievance and made-up victimhood. 80m people absolutely eat it up.
The USA will likely become a victim of it's own cruelty, stupid policies and nonsense and then his voter base will actually agree with him even more. They will truly feel like they were hard done by and lap up the BS even more. Which will be scary because it will reach biblical levels of worship if it already hasn't. Going to be wild.
An observation by Umberto Eco in his essay Ur-Fascism:
> 8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
* https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
The possible 'validity' of the US being a victim would be NATO allies not spending want they promised, 2% of GDP. But folks like Vance are going after even Poland at times, who is spending more per GDP than even the US in recent years.
To entertain this, though, is there anyone that thinks that if every NATO member spent 2% (or 4%, or 10%) the US military budget would be smaller? Does anyone think this for a second?
Trump hasn't even entertained reducing the military budgets, despite effectively withdrawing from the world and becoming isolationist in policy. He has asked for cuts in some areas to allocate to his "own agenda", militarily, which should disturb people, but the military is a sacred cow. And of course there was the $2.9 trillion dollar adventure in Iraq. And the $2.3 trillion dollar adventure in Afghanistan. Wars that cost NATO lives and money, but ostensibly had nothing to do with NATO.
Trump keeps repeating his talking point that the US purportedly spends $200B a year "defending" Canada (a number so fantastically stupid that it should yield instant laughter by all), which is hysterical as the single military threat to Canada, it has been demonstrated, is the United States (this isn't new -- in the 1980s Canada blocked the UK from selling Canada nuclear submarines as it would allow the country to defend Northern sovereignty from the US). And FWIW, Canada could have had nuclear weapons in the 1940s, or any year since. And that is precisely what we should acquire -- as should Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, etc -- and we can enjoy the Trump world of outrageous nuclear proliferation.
What's important is that countries promised to do so—and didn't. And this isn't a sudden thing: the agreement was reached in the NATO summit in Latvia in 2006.
(Speaking as a Canadian.)
But there was no promise that was broken.
> In 2006, NATO member nations set a policy goal to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to annual defence spending. While some countries, most notably the United States, exceeded this target, the majority fell short. After eight years of limited progress, NATO members reaffirmed their commitment to this goal in 2014. Since this time, Canada has consistently remained below the 2% threshold, and as of 2024, it is one of only eight member nations still failing to meet the target, with projected defence expenditures totaling only 1.37% of GDP.
* https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2425-020-S--fiscal...
2014 was simply was a repetition of what was said in 2006. But:
> The alliance members accepted to continue to spend a minimum of two percent of individual national Gross Domestic Product on defence, or where a country is currently spending less than two percent, then to move towards spending two percent of Gross Domestic Product on defence within the next ten years.
* https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corpora...
It's been ten years now, and Canada has not hit two percent even if you take 2014 as the starting point.
(And I'm aware of all the procurement programs that have been announced.)
Imagine being on top of the world, the richest large country on the planet, and declaring that really you're the victim. There is a fundamental blindness to realize that all of these things are not givens, and that things can get much, much, much worse.
And they are going to get much worse. And Trump's approval rating will probably dip to 45%. The US has committed to the bit of being a modern idiocracy that just like the excitement of "oh boy, what hijinx is he going to do today???"