Trump makes us look — again

“Made you look,” is a children’s game where a kid points to something that doesn’t exist just to get another kid to look in that direction. Then the perpetrator mocks the victim: “Made you look! Made you look!”

One of the dumber games, but it usually works.

U.S. President Donald Trump is a master of this game. He can infallibly trick the public into looking over there, drawing their attention away from something else that he doesn’t want them to see. He is the king of distraction.

So when Trump announced on Saturday that he may send the U.S. Army into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing,” the smart money instantly assumed that something new and embarrassing was coming out about him and Epstein. Because surely he couldn’t be serious about invading Nigeria, could he?

Yet he is going through the motions with complete seriousness. Accusing the Nigerian government of not doing enough to protect its Christian citizens from Islamist extremists, he declared on social media that “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!”

Wait a minute. “Fast and vicious” attacks are not normally described as “sweet,” except by people who are addicted to violence or at least want to be seen as scary. And Nigerian Christians are not some downtrodden minority in need of being cherished by Trump; they are the richer half of the population in Africa’s most populous country.

Yet Trump says he has instructed the Defense Department — recently renamed the Department of War — to “prepare for action.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth replied: “Yes sir. The Department of War is preparing for action. Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

Really? I can believe that an American president might invade Venezuela, which is close, defiant and not very powerful militarily. In fact, that may happen any day now. But Nigeria is very far away across a large ocean (about 8,000 kilometres) and it has around 230 million people (about twice the size of France, but with almost four times as many people).

There are indeed radical Islamist groups in the north that do a great deal of killing, but the people they are killing are overwhelmingly less fanatical Muslims.

It’s tempting to dismiss this fantasy as just another case of Trump bearing the impression of the last person he talked to (presumably in this case a not very well-travelled evangelical Christian), but that’s a bit too easy. It assumes that behind this ridiculous facade there really are grown-ups in charge, but where is the evidence for that? Who are they?

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, most pundits would reply — and behind him the evil geniuses who wrote the 900-page Project 2025 plan for radically restructuring the federal government and concentrating all power in the executive branch.

There is clearly a huge effort being put into this project: Congress has been largely sidelined and the Supreme Court is reliably pro-Republican. But the evil geniuses owe all of their power to Trump’s popularity with the MAGA movement, and they seem to have no control whatever over his behaviour.

Which brings us back to the highly erratic and self-interested behaviour of Trump himself. While Trump’s plans to overawe and maybe destroy the existing Venezuelan regime grew naturally out of previous U.S. government policies in the region, a large part of his foreign policy is basically driven by random enthusiasms.

This obviously includes things like his relentless pursuit of the Nobel Prize, his fantasy of a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza (of which we may not have heard the last), his half-baked plans for the annexation of Greenland, Canada and Panama, and now his notion of a military crusade to “save” the Christians of Nigeria.

It is very unlikely that any of these things will come to pass, but if the Project 2025 mob cannot stop him from frittering away his own popular support, they will all go down together. And yes, if there are new revelations about Trump and Epstein on the way then Trump needs useful distractions, but at the same time they may be his actual ambitions, however foolish.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.