Literally serious
By 
Current CNN headline:
Trump is teasing US expansion into Panama, Greenland and Canada
Well that’s one way to put it.
President-elect Donald Trump appears to be entertaining an American territorial expansion that, if he’s serious, would rival the Louisiana Purchase or the deal that netted Alaska from Russia.
In the past week, he’s taunted Canadian officials by suggesting the US could absorb its northern neighbor and make it the 51st state. He threatened to take over the Panama Canal, the US-made waterway controlled for a quarter century by its Central American namesake. And on Sunday, he resurfaced his first-term desire to obtain Greenland, a Danish territory he has long eyed.
With Trump, the differences between serious policy proposals and rhetorical flourishes intended to stoke media attention or energize his base are not always clear. At other times, his provocations have appeared to be the opening salvos in his attempts at dealmaking.
The problem with a frame that asks whether Trump is just an attention-seeking demagogic buffoon, or has aspirations to genuine fascist revanchism and lebensraum, is that this isn’t by any means an either/or situation. Demagogic buffoonery is the very heart of fascism. This well-known P.G. Wodehouse passage wouldn’t be nearly as funny if history hadn’t reduced Oswald Mosley to a figure of less than zero significance to the post-war world:
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”
I’ve seen various comments here about how none of this territorial expansion stuff has anything real behind it: it’s just Trump grabbing headlines with meaningless mouth noises, before he moves on to his next publicity stunt next week, or tomorrow, or this evening.
Maybe. But Trump’s entire political career started as a buffoonish publicity stunt, and look where that ended up. And there’s no question that the transformation of the GOP into a straight-up cult could have some genuine consequences in regard to all this apparent nonsense:
“I always take him seriously, even though they may sound a little bit out there,” Florida GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez said of Trump’s comments on Fox Business on Monday. “It’s a legitimate threat to Panama.”
This was meant as a compliment.
Speaking in Arizona this weekend, Trump also reiterated plans to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a distinction that could preface the use of military force on Mexican soil. Trump has threatened to drop bombs on fentanyl labs and send special forces to take out cartel leaders, an incursion that could violate Mexico’s sovereignty and disrupt relations with the United States’ largest trading partner.
Yes of course he’s not going to do anything like that, until he does.
Trumpism is threatening to reverse Marx’s famous historical formula: First as farce, then as tragedy. In that as in so many other ways, it is a genuine fascist movement, as much as the Very Serious People dislike such crude insinuations against the effectiveness of our institutional guardrails etc.
So I suggest taking the jokes seriously.