The Vanity Project Presidency

A White House ballroom, the Trump-Kennedy Center, a Trump class warship, all utterly unreal and all in service to a very needy, very small man

I should probably be more upbeat, even optimistic at Christmas, but I find myself in the same frame of mind as Jimmy Kimmel, the once cancelled TV talk show host.

Reports out of the U.K. this week said that Kimmel would present his version of a royal Christmas Day speech on Channel 4, and according to a spokesman would say, “From a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year.”

Well, yes. Yes it has.

It’s not clear that Jimmy said precisely those words, but they were certainly in the spirit of what he actually said, as reported by The Guardian:

Here in the United States right now, we are both figuratively and literally tearing down the structures of our democracy. From the free press, to science, to medicine, to judicial independence, to the actual White House itself, we are a right mess. And we know this is also affecting you, and I just wanted to say sorry. And we want you to know or, at least I want you to know, that we’re not all like him. We’re not all like that.

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Many thanks.

DJT Derangement

I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose precisely what ails the Man in the High Castle White House, but you don’t need to be a Viennese-trained psychoanalyst to know that something is really and seriously wrong here.

Raging narcissism has long been a feature of the personality of Donald J. Trump, but what we’ve seen with our our own disbelieving eyes over the last few weeks is substantially more than his run of the mill “it’s all about me” personality disorder.

If any of us had a relative display the behavior of Trump over the last weeks, we’d be organizing a family intervention. Instead Trump’s enablers - Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent, just to name two of the most obvious - seem content to let the president act out his greatest fantasies, while they stand and stare.

Thought bubble: I can’t believe this …

More on the Narcissist-in-Chief’s mental and physical state in a moment.

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Who in his right mind says this?

Trump’s social media tirade after the tragic murders of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner should seal the deal about Trump’s deranged mind. I hesitate to repeat the vile language, but do ask yourself if any remotely rational person would have said what Trump said. And then when asked about the vileness he doubled down.

“… all goals and expectations of greatness …”

Notwithstanding the vile words about the Reiners, who in the world - and in their right mind - talks like that?

And who orders the destruction of the East Wing of the White House after saying he wouldn’t? Commander Vanity that’s who.

Have we seen the actual plans for Trump’s new ballroom? Nope. We’ve seen some renderings focusing heavily on lots of gold plated tacky features.

Plumbing permits? Not needed. A comprehensive structural engineering plan? Forget about it. Detailed architectural drawings? Nah. Vanity don’t need no planning.

The Kennedy Center was created by an Act of Congress

The White House press secretary announces the “unanimous” decision (it wasn’t) of the Kennedy Center board to rename the national performing arts center and memorial to John F. Kennedy as the Trump-Kennedy Center.

Trump immediately says that’s a great honor as though he hadn’t thought of it himself, and then the next day the new lettering goes on the side of the building.

This was clearly in the works for weeks or months, but it’s still illegal

The Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace in place of the United States Institute of Peace? Why not.

As the Associated Press reported:

… the State Department said it renamed the organization to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” The new name could be seen on its building, which is near the State Department.

Greenland, again

Appoint the Governor of Louisiana - Louisiana? - as a “special envoy” to figure out how to “annex” Greenland? Sure. Why not?

But, wait. How does that work in actual practice?

My pal Bob Mann writes from Baton Rouge:

I’m not a lawyer, but I can read, and the words in the Louisiana Constitution and state law are simple, straightforward, and very much to the point: A sitting governor cannot simultaneously hold another public office.

Here’s the Constitution: “During his tenure in office, a statewide elected official shall hold no other public office except by virtue of his elected office.”

In other words, the governor or other statewide elected officials may hold another public office only if that second office automatically comes with the first one. That is, if a state law assigns the additional role because the person holds the statewide office.

So Donnie “No Impulse Control” Trump appoints a guy from a state with about as much in common with Greenland as Wyoming has in common with Beijing, and it turns out the guy can’t legally serve in the job.

Good staff work, if there was any staff work. Highly doubtful.

If we can believe Trump - a most questionable concept - he just “appointed” Landry after the swamp rat governor called and volunteered to get into a very public fight with Denmark and Greenland.

“I didn’t call him. He called me. He’s very proactive. He’s a great guy. He’s a deal guy. He’s a deal maker type guy,” the president explained.

OK. A deal maker, you say.

One recent Landry deal was to insert himself into the hiring of a new LSU football coach, a fellow grifter by name of Lane Kiffin. The “deal” that the great dealmaker Jeff Landry made sounds alot like LSU being scammed by a sleazy used car salesman.

Here’s how ESPN explained the work of Trump’s “deal maker type guy.”

Lane Kiffin’s contract with LSU includes the unique clause that he will receive a payment equal to the amount he would have earned for coaching Ole Miss in the upcoming College Football Playoff, according to a term sheet obtained by ESPN on Monday.

Kiffin, who agreed to a seven-year contract with LSU on Sunday that will pay him $13 million annually, will receive the same CFP bonus from LSU that he would have if he had remained with Ole Miss through this postseason. That begins at $150,000 for the Rebels’ participation in a first-round CFP game, increases to $250,000 for participation in a quarterfinal and tops out at $1 million if Ole Miss wins the national championship.

So, LSU is paying it’s new coach for the continuing success of his former team. What a deal. Trump’s kind of guy.

Those deal making skills will surely reel in Greenland in no time at all.

And you have to love the response from Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielson:

After Trump made the appointment on Sunday, Greenland's Nielsen commented on Facebook: "We have woken up again to a new announcement from the U.S. president. This may sound big, but it does not change anything for us. We decide our own future."

I think the prime minister showed great restraint in not just blurting out “are you freakin’ crazy, man?”

Battleships? Really, battleships?

And this week’s - so far - howler: Trump’s new battleships!

I don’t know, the guy looks healthy to me

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last says the Trump battleships “are the Navy’s Trump Ballroom.”

It is unlikely that any of these ships will ever be built. This is vaporware. No different than the Foxconn mega-plant in Wisconsin, or all of the iPhones that are just about to be made in America, or the addition of Canada as the 51st state, or the annexation of Greenland.

And just for the record: there is no congressional authorization or appropriation for these make believe ships and there is serious doubt whether the Navy even wants them. The kind of ship Trump envisions is so 1945, unneeded, lacking a mission, a sitting duck for today’s war fighting technology, but fulfilling the cravings of the Vanity Project Presidency. ¹

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

As with all Trump vanity projects, no one seems to be asking what national purpose is served by these new plans. Does the Navy need new ships? What should it do with them if it gets them? Do they really need to be armed with nuclear weapons? The answer from the Trump administration, clearly, is: Who cares? As retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Fleet plan is “exactly what we don’t need”—but, he added, no one is focused on America’s maritime needs, because “they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

So, the Trump Ballroom, the Trump Peace Institute, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump Class “battleships.”

What next? The Trump-Lincoln Memorial? The Donald J. Trump Grand Canyon National Park?

What was she thinking?

It’s remarkably fitting, given the state of this presidency and the mental state of the president, that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles granted 11 on the record interviews over the last many months to a magazine called Vanity Fair.

Vanity … Fair

The Wiles interviews were granted to Chris Whipple who has made himself an expert on the top staff job at the White House.

So while virtually everyone who has paid attention to this story continues to wonder why she did it, Wiles offered a fascinating - deeply disturbing - analogy regarding Trump. Wiles’ father, legendary football broadcaster Pat Summerall, was an alcoholic much of his life.

This paragraph will go down in White House history.

“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

Was that remarkable comment a boast? A threat? Or perhaps a cry for help?

The so called “main stream media” has almost completely avoided any comprehensive coverage of the president’s increasingly erratic behavior. There have been some mentions here and there of Trump seemingly falling asleep in meetings, slurring words and constantly repeating himself.

But the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have supplied nothing remotely like the detailed coverage devoted to Joe Biden’s decline.

You have to look beyond the usual Beltway sources for coverage of whether Trump is losing it or has already lost it.

Is Trump mentally OK? A look back at the president’s unusual behavior in 2025

That headline is from The Guardian this week.

Trump has appeared to fall asleep during some meetings; amid others, he has drifted off-topic, launching into bizarre segues on interior decor or about whales and birds. His public appearances have lacked focus, and he has used speeches to ramble about how Barack Obama walks down stairs, or to invent stories about the Unabomber.

A few other news outlets have gone farther.

Dr. John Gartner told The Daily Beast Podcast this week “that the 79-year-old president’s claim to have ‘aced’ three Montreal Cognitive Assessments could be more than simple routine screenings for the degenerative disease.”

“You know, he kind of gave the game away again, as he often does,” Gartner, a former professor at Johns Hopkins, told co-host Joanna Coles about Trump claiming to have passed a test in front of “large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.”

“You could maybe justify giving someone the MoCA once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you’re giving it to him three times, that means you’re not assessing dementia. That means you’re monitoring dementia,” Gartner said.

And writing in The Hill newspaper, lawyer Chris Truax - he once worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign - issued a spirited call for journalists to cover Trump’s decline more vigorously.

Trump has always been rude and insulting, but in the past, his insults were calculated and served a political purpose. When he began referring to the press as “the enemy of the people” back in 2017, it wasn’t a spontaneous outburst. Rather, it was part of a carefully scripted campaign. Contrast that to his many recent attacks on reporters — usually female reporters — including the “Quiet. Quiet, piggy” incident and bizarrely informing a random reporter that she could not pass a cognitive test.

Then there is his social media posting, a study in disinhibition for the digital age. In addition to his disturbing post about Reiner, who can forget the time he reposted a video featuring him wearing a crown and flying a jet while dumping feces on No Kings protesters? Anyone over the age of 10 would have known that was grossly inappropriate. Trump did not.

Am I diagnosing Trump with dementia based on these outbursts alone? No. But it is impossible not to acknowledge that all this behavior is perfectly consistent with dementia. If you had seen this in a family member, you would instantly push for a medical intervention to find out exactly what was going on.

One reality of Trump World is that so many things are happening all the time that it’s near impossible to process the merely illegal, corrupt and stupid from the profoundly deranged and dangerously bizarre. The most obvious thing, visible to all, the alcoholic-like behavior his own chief of staff identified for us, is too often dismissed as “Trump being Trump.”

The president’s increasingly bizarre, unwell behavior is a flashing four alarm siren. This man has the nuclear codes and commands the world’s most powerful military, while surrounded by the most incompetent and venal cast of enablers - here the alcoholic comparison really works - to ever occupy the West Wing.

Pray we don’t wake up one morning soon to witness that the “nothing he can’t do” has become pure catastrophe.

1. Ukraine has used drones with considerable success to attack Russian naval vessels. Here’s a PBS report on how they do it.