There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”
There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island.
Mr. Trump’s family and supporters like to say “We are so back!” and they are, without doubt. Yet as the man who will be president again spun out threats and angry denouncements of the Biden administration and personal grievances for more than an hour on Tuesday in the living room of his Mar-a-Lago club, something else was back: the chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency.
Mr. Trump has returned to our daily national cognizance, even though one could argue he never really left. Tuesday’s news conference was a reminder of what that was like, and what the next four years may have in store.
He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”
Then he moved on to the prospect of a military clash with Denmark. After refusing to rule out the prospect of coercing a NATO ally with the use of force if it remained reluctant to turn over property the president-elect coveted, Mr. Trump suggested that Denmark had a dubious claim on Greenland anyway.
“People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security,” he said.
As for Panama, he insisted the United States had to defend against an urgent national security threat from China, though the situation around the canal is little changed from the last time Mr. Trump sat in the Oval Office.
“It might be that you’ll have to do something,” he said with signature vagueness, when asked about his suggestion that the only solution to this problem may be military force.
There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security is threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.
But there were also several differences in this version of Mr. Trump that are easy to overlook in a man who can move, in an instant, from the failures of American plumbing to the need to revive the territory-grabbing spirit of President William McKinley.
This time, he appears eager to get going in a way he was not in 2017. Time and again on Tuesday he seemed to resent the fact that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still president. He complained that he could not meet with Vladimir V. Putin to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war until he was actually sworn in. He railed at the flurry of executive orders Mr. Biden has issued in recent days, designed to tie Mr. Trump’s hands, or at least slow him down. He seemed particularly angry about one that barred offshore drilling along much of the U.S. coastline, which he said he would immediately reverse — unless he had to take it to court first.
Mr. Biden, he said, was “essentially getting rid of $50 to $60 trillion worth of assets” beneath the sea floor, without explaining why few companies were drilling there in the decades before the order. He never addressed the environmental considerations that went into Mr. Biden’s decision.
When the subject turned to the Middle East, Mr. Trump spoke like he was already in charge of the negotiations, and he called his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, to the stage to declare “we’ve had some really great progress.” But as Mr. Witkoff later noted, the negotiations were being directed by Mr. Biden’s team, not Mr. Trump’s, though Trump representatives have been invited to participate, since they will soon inherit three-dimensional diplomacy with Israel and Hamas.
Nonetheless, it seemed at times like Mr. Trump was already president, in large part because Mr. Biden has faded from the scene so quickly.
This was Mr. Trump’s second full news conference at Mar-a-Lago since he began forming his government, and in that respect, it follows tradition: Mr. Biden held a number of news conferences in Delaware four years ago, denouncing Russia for its “Solar Winds” hack of a critical piece of American software and then expressing horror at the violence wrought at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But in the past six months, Mr. Biden has ceded the stage, making Mr. Trump’s voice all the louder, his influence all the greater. The last lengthy Biden news conference came last July, after the NATO summit in Washington, and his aides were white-knuckled through the whole thing, fearful he would freeze up again as he did on the stage debating Mr. Trump in June.
When Mr. Biden issues executive orders these days, they are issued on paper or an email; he rarely talks about them, or take detailed questions. He has never spoken publicly on the Chinese hack of the American telecommunications companies, which his aides describe as perhaps the most urgent new national security threat of the past six months. (Curiously, neither has Mr. Trump, who could make a clearer case for why the hack of the innards of the American communications systems is a threat to American government and private industry than he could about long-existing Chinese ports near the Panama Canal.)
With the departing incumbent fading from view, Mr. Trump seems to sense that if he takes the stage, there will be no one to push back on his interpretation of recent history. He is rewriting that history quickly, just as he recast the events of Jan. 6, in hopes that his election was evidence that Americans believe he was pursued by prosecutors out of vengeance, not the application of justice.
“That’s a sick group of people, and it was all to influence the election,” Mr. Trump said of Jack Smith, the special counsel. “It was all a fight against their political opponent. We’ve never had that in this country. We have had that in certain countries. We’ve had that in third-tier countries.” Inevitably, he started talking about “banana republics,” a familiar line from the first term. Some things don’t change.
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