“As is often the case with Trump, there’s a value in taking him seriously but not literally,” Wednesday morning’s Politico Playbook writes of the convicted felon President-Elect’s deranged Tuesday press conference, opting for that extremely fucking tired trope to explain the fat bastard’s implied threats of military force against Denmark and Panama to seize Greenland and the canal, respectively.

“Even if this isn’t something he literally intends to do, publicly flirting with the concept signals a seriousness about a foreign policy approach in his second term in which the so-called ‘madman’ theory will play a big role. (That’s the RICHARD NIXON-era idea that the US would gain an upper hand on the international stage if it made adversarial nations think that the president was so volatile that they should avoid provoking the US, lest Nixon respond with fury and force),” the Beltway newsletter continued, plainly in awe of the cerebral genius of a man who, at the very same press conference, also claimed Hezbollah agents were at the Capitol riot he incited and went on a rant about how electric home heating systems cause people to itch more than fossil fuel-based ones.

Following a few more few paragraphs of bullshit ascribing the madman’s rants to the “madman theory,” Playbook finally actually makes an attempt to map out the possible political implications of the imperialist batshittery in practice: “To MAGA diehards, there’s a substantial degree of trolling going on here – a delight in the idea of conquering Canada to own the libs. But to the large number of Americans who voted for Trump simply because they liked his economy or wanted lower grocery and gas prices, or because they agreed with the idea of putting Americans first instead of the folly of foreign interventionism – this probably all seems like a distraction at best or a bait-and-switch at worst. And that’s something Trump world would be wise to take both seriously and literally.”

Both seriously and literally go fuck yourselves, Politico Playbook.