Paolo Kernahan
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump is taking his circus on a world tour; some are loving it, but more aren't. The saying used to be, 'What a week it's been in US politics!' Those parameters have been shrunk considerably.
Americans are now processing incalculable amounts of 'information' and 'revelations' on an hourly basis from the White House, from a man who has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of dominating news cycles. The news cycle is now almost exclusively the spin cycle. The press briefings and news releases are theatrical, nearly comical gospels according to Trump.
Those, however, are eclipsed by the tweet-style headlines, many of which are from DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), which is (not) headed by Elon Musk. There's also Trump's stream of consciousness on his platform, Truth Social.
This slurry is unleashed in such volumes it's impossible to fact-check it all. This is the goal: sustain a flurry of declarations, alleged discoveries, false assertions and grandiose announcements - sow them across fertile disinformation fields and watch the MAGA crowd take it from there.
That wouldn't be a problem if Americans were the only ones grappling with this "new world order."
However, this Trump administration - the episode where he's not really in charge - appears keen on sprinkling a fair bit of that chaos all around the world. And thus dawns the bizarre era of US insular expansionism: America first…everywhere.
When Trump first mooted the concept of a Gulf of America, there was laughter, because people thought, "This is just his way - saying stupid things to kidnap public attention"
Well, Google included the "Gulf of America" in brackets below "Gulf of Mexico| on maps of the area. The Associated Press has been banned indefinitely from White House briefings for refusing to acknowledge this new appellation. As time wore on, and painfully so, it would appear that this name change would be one of the more benign acts of this administration.
Vice President Vance was busy creating a gulf of his own - one between Europe and the US. Vance upbraided European leaders for what he decried as attacks on free speech. He offered succour to the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), a far-right party that's a nod to Germany's Nazi past - meeting with its leader and snubbing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Of course, Vance's talk about free speech was all part of an elaborate disinformation scheme.
The AfD's Alice Weidel was on prime-time television with other politicians when Vance was in Europe. The party holds several seats in the German parliament. So much for claims of free-speech suppression.
The US VP's entreaties to the AfD were music to the ears of other far-right movements across Europe, where migration has spawned a wave of populism eerily reminiscent of 1930s Europe.
Vance kept mentioning US 'allies,' but having broken with Europe and antagonising Canada, Mexico and many others, it's hard to imagine who's left…apart from Israel and other odd supplicant na
