HERE'S A POSSIBLE GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE STARTING IN JANUARY 2025

The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey reports:

Former president Donald Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and “bomb the s--t out of Russia.” ...

“And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch,” he said of labeling U.S. military planes with Chinese flags and bombing Russia, which was met with laughter from the crowd of donors, according to a recording of the speech obtained by The Washington Post.

My favorite gloss on this so far:

You can tell this is a signature Actual Trump Idea® not just because it's exceedingly dangerous and obviously criminal, but also because he chose the least effective means of doing it, an air-to-air fighter that is operated exclusively by the United States. https://t.co/4RfbAGdkPS

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) March 6, 2022

I keep warning you that Trump easily wins every 2024 GOP primary poll in which he's included, and that he's beating Joe Biden by nearly 4 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average. It's early, but for now. Trump is the favorite to be elected president in 2024.

And this time, if he wins, he'll actually do the crazy things he's proposed doing in the past. We won't be reading about subordinates refusing to carry out Trump's most irresponsible orders, the way we did in 2018, when Bob Woodward's book Fear was published:

The book opens with a dramatic scene. Former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn saw a draft letter he considered dangerous to national security on the Oval Office desk.

The letter would have withdrawn the US from a critical trade agreement with South Korea. Trump’s aides feared the fallout could jeopardize a top-secret national security program: the ability to detect a North Korean missile launch within just seven seconds.

Woodward reports Cohn was “appalled” that Trump might sign the letter. “I stole it off his desk,” Cohn told an associate. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.”

Cohn was not alone. Former staff secretary Rob Porter worked with Cohn and used the same tactic on multiple occasions, Woodward writes. In addition to literally stealing or hiding documents from Trump’s desk, they sought to stall and delay decisions or distract Trump from orders they thought would endanger national security.

“A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas,” said Porter....

John Bolton has said on a couple of occasions that he all but begged Trump not to withdraw the United States from NATO.

Bolton, in an interview with Post opinions editor at large Michael Duffy, said the former president came close to pulling the United States out of NATO in 2018, a claim he originally made in a memoir published in 2020. In his book, Bolton wrote that he had to convince Trump not to quit NATO in the middle of a 2018 summit.

On Friday, Bolton, who served as a top Trump adviser from 2018 to 2019, offered more details on their conversations that day, saying he “had my heart in my throat at that NATO meeting.”

“I didn’t know what the president would do,” Bolton said. “He called me up to his seat seconds before he gave the speech. And I said, look, go right up to the line, but don’t go over it. I sat back down. I had no idea what he’d do.”

Bolton said he thought Trump would “put his foot over it, but at least he didn’t withdraw then.”

In that Post interview, Bolton said, “In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO.” But why use that verb tense? It's quite possible that Trump will get a second term.

If he does, it's safe to say that this time he won't hire advisers who are "swamp creatures," which to him means anyone who's had relevant government experience and who agrees even somewhat with mainstream thinking. He'll hire provocateur pundits and other whack jobs. Some will need Senate approval, but a Republican-controlled Senate will rubber-stamp all or most of them. If a crazy idea like reflagging F-22s pops into his head, maybe the generals will still be able to stop him, but there'll be many ideas that no one will stop because he'll hire only the kinds of people who'll want him to do as he pleases, because when the "lamestream media" and the "Deep State" and the "globalists" are howling, you must be doing something right.

In 2024, Democrats should portray Trump as the irresponsible loudmouth and loose cannon most Americans know him to be. But they should also run against the disastrous decisions he was prevented from carrying out, because he won't be stopped in a second term.