Tantrump!

We all knew it, but in the last few days he confirmed it. He is a baby with a full diaperload.

Donald Trump’s petulance over not getting to own Greenland resolved itself, finally, into a truly spectacular foot-stampy totalitarian tantrum, encapsulated in this infantile, deranged saber-rattling diplomatic communique he sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway. To summarize, it is an implied threat of war because Norway didn’t give him The Nobel Peace Prize:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

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I decided to do a deep dive into this notion of immaturity in leadership. It turns out that this is actually a subject that has been studied by PhDs, even from before the era of Trump. They have winnowed it down to five criteria:

• Defensiveness: Shifting blame to others rather than taking accountability.

• Narcissism: Constant need for approval and validation, often coupled with a fragile ego.

• Grandiosity in thinking and actions.

• Impulsivity: Making hasty, emotional decisions rather than strategic ones.

• Dehumanization: Treating opponents or critics as inferior or nonexistent.

Five for Five was pretty good.

Next, I sought historical examples of childlike infantile behavior in heads of state. The list was disappointingly tepid and familiar. Yes, yes, Turkmenbashi the Great peevishly outlawed black cars in Turkmenistan’s capital and egomaniacally renamed the months of the year after himself and his mom. Sure, Charles V of France refused to be physically touched because he insisted that he and he alone knew his body was made of glass. Yes, Mao had a tanty over modern medicine and stubbornly refused to use dentifrices, but preferred to rely on shamanistic advice to eat tea leaves, so his teeth were green, and he also eschewed Western toilets, preferring to poop outdoors in a hole in the ground. Boring, ordinary stuff.

But then I found someone I’d somehow never heard of. The ur-Trump.

Francisco Macías Nguema was the first president of Equatorial Guinea, from 1968 to 1979. He has been called “The Stupid Pol Pot.” This is him after his arrest and, um, before his execution by firing squad:

Consider some parallels.

Nguema surrounded himself with incompetent, fawning yes men who would do whatever he wanted.

He was a science denier. He banned all Western medicine, including vaccines — instead substituting the nostrums prescribed by witch doctors and other quacks.

Upon taking office, he ended long-time international alliances with Spain and other European countries, instead shifting allegiance to Russia and North Korea, with whom he found himself more temperamentally and philosophically aligned.

He reveled in his own name, putting it everywhere, and giving himself new titles. They included “The Unique Miracle” and “The Grand Master of Education, Science and Culture.”

He didn’t like smart people. He said he preferred the support of the under-educated.

He himself was nearly illiterate, and was kind of tetchy about that, so he outlawed the word “intellectual”: You could be jailed if you were overheard saying it. He is reported to have ordered the death of anyone wearing glasses, viewing them as a sign of superior education and, therefore, a threat.

He mistrusted all public education, eventually shutting it down; then, because desperate people were sending their kids to private schools, he banned those, on the grounds that they were “subversive.”

When it became clear people were fleeing his country — which was derisively getting called “The Dachau of Africa” — he ordered all boats to be destroyed, which in turn destroyed the country’s fishing industry, which led to starvation.

Oh, yes. He was an infantile maniac … but also a really brutal son of a bitch.

One year, he had 186 suspected dissidents executed inside a football stadium, as amplifiers in the stadium played "Those Were the Days",^[by Mary Hopkin, his favorite song. Most of them were shot or hanged, but about 30 were spared for the moment and ordered to dig ditches. Then they were buried up to their necks in the ditches and eaten alive by red ants.

He savaged people whom he considered his enemies; arrests were constant, and common. Death sentences were handed out without even a pretense of due process. Men were beaten to death by clubs; women were raped in front of their husbands. The precise numbers are in dispute, but it is said at least 20,000 of the 300,000 people living in the country were killed under his regime, with tens of thousands more successfully fleeing.

I’m not saying we’re headed there.

I’m just saying.

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Moments in media namby-pamby cowardice:

Please read the Washington Post coverage of this story. Search hard for a “nut graf” with any contextualizing —any suggestion, however timid, of the worrisome insanity of all of this.

No, I couldn’t find one either. Because it’s not there.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

That’s it.

And please: