Melvin Goodman, whose most recent book is titled, American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump, talks about President Trump’s disastrous foreign policy including his attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president; threats to takeover Greenland and breakup NATO; his irrational imposition of tariffs around the world and the subject of his recent columns, “Donald Trump, Poster Child for Megalomania” and “Nazi Germany 1933 and MAGA America 2025.”
Goodman is also a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and a former CIA analyst.
Of course, here in the U.S., as I mentioned a moment ago, we’re witnessing the terrorizing the people of Minnesota with the virtual invasion of some 3,000 heavily-armed ICE agents that have now killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good. And just the other day of course, we heard about the tragic shooting death of Alex Pretti, provoking mass protests in a one-day general strike, a work stoppage that took place in Minnesota last Friday. Mel, I wonder if you would just share with our listeners some of your thoughts on Donald Trump’s policy decisions, clearly erratic and what we believe what many are coming to believe are dangerous signs of serious mental health issues combined with dementia.
MEL GOODMAN: I’ve been saying for a long time, going back to the first term, that Donald Trump isn’t compos mentos. He’s a serious pathological narcissist. He’s paranoid. His decision-making is questionable on every level. And what you see to me, in terms of this disorderly nature of his decision-making is an unraveling of his policy, an unraveling of his administration and an unraveling of his mind.
And when I look at what’s happening in Minnesota, frankly in some ways this scares me the most because when you look at the Department of Homeland Security, that seems to be functioning as a ministry of the interior, and we know authoritarian regimes always create a ministry of interior—When you think of what the Soviet Union did over the years or East Germany did over the years or the MUP in Serbia designed to suppress dissent. So when you look at ICE, you’ve got the DHS police force that’s very reminiscent of the brownshirts of various authoritarian entities. And then you add to that the Customs and Border Police and the Secret Service for that matter, the DHS or Department of Homeland Security really functions at that ministry of interior. And then when you observe Trump in the last few months, there’s such a disorderly nature to his comments.
He was talking about Greenland and about four or five times referred to Iceland. And I don’t know if he knows the difference. The pressure on the Norwegian government, which has nothing to do with the granting of Nobel Prizes, that’s a special committee run by elite citizens of Norway. And then forcing the Venezuela opposition leader to basically turn over her Nobel Prize, which Trump sorely sought. Now, why would you give a Nobel Prize to someone who’s used force in the way he has in a very erratic fashion? And the irony to me is he closed down the Institute of Peace and now it’s been reopened. I don’t think there are any personnel in the building, but it’s now Donald Trump’s Institute of Peace, the same thing he did with the Kennedy Center. He’s done now to the Institute of Peace, which was a group of elite intellectuals and policymakers and former diplomats to look for ways to conduct conflict resolution.
And what alarmed me and why I wrote the piece about Nazi Germany, 1933 and MAGA America in 2025 is a lot of what we’re seeing in Trump’s first year was very reminiscent of what Hitler did. I’m not going to compare Trump to Hitler, even though I must add that JD Vance once referred to Trump as America’s Hitler. But the way Hitler attacked various elite institutions—whether they were the courts, whether they were law firms, elite universities, even the book burning in a sense, you see this going on in the Trump administration, the way he’s gone after elite universities, the way he’s forced the Smithsonian Institution to change its exhibits to make sure there’s no criticism whatsoever of U.S. policy over the years or the U.S. democracy over the years. And finally, he just—doesn’t follow the law.
And we knew that from the very beginning in the first term when he removed the IGs, the inspectors general of not only the intelligence community, but most of the federal government so that we are in a situation now where you have a president who doesn’t follow the law, who’s not obedient to the law, who is not interested in accountability. He’s not interested in any institutional accounting, particularly for transgressions.
And this is all culminated in what happened in that execution of an ICU nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital. And now we have video including new, I understand new video from cameras that some of the ICE police were wearing, that this was an execution. It was done execution-style. There were at least nine or 10 shots fired into the ICU nurse, most of them in his back. So this is very worrisome in terms of where do we go from here. Now, I thought there might have been a sign of a breakthrough. The head of the Customs and Border Police Unit in Minneapolis is going to be brought out of the state of Minnesota tomorrow with some officers from the CBP. We don’t know how many and we don’t know where he is headed. If he leaves Minnesota only to go to Maine, that won’t be a positive sign.
But apparently Trump has now talked to Gov. Walz and he is talked to the mayor of Minneapolis, and you have now Republicans including 29 Republicans in the House as well as Sen. Cruz of Texas and even Gov. Abbott of Texas who are telling the administration they have to back off. And I thought another interesting sign was a Republican candidate for the governorship of Minnesota has taken himself out of the race saying he no longer agrees with the policies of the National Republican party and that no Republican could win a race in Minnesota in the near term.
So it’s all very alarming. It’s a terrible picture of militarism and his personal mendacity, which is really shared by all the members of his cabinet. Kristi Noem has lied about this shooting in Minnesota. The head of the FBI has been lying about certain aspects of FBI activity. The intelligence community has been politicized, the Pentagon has been politicized. There’s been a purge of generals and you have someone who’s the secretary of war and the fact that Trump wants to rename the secretary, the secretary of war and the Defense Department, the Department of War, tells you that he’s interested in fear. He’s interested in authority and his mindset to the extent that there is a mindset, is incredibly dangerous. There’s a lot to worry about here.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said, Mel. One thing that you mentioned a moment ago that I think is true here. If there is any objective to Trump’s policies, it’s to keep the American people in a constant state of anxiety and fear. There are a lot of Trump supporters that see all that insane, crazy, irrational, erratic behavior and say, Donald Trump is playing three-dimensional chess and Europe just playing checkers. You’ve heard that before. But they’re no way to explain what’s going on with any three-dimensional chess comparisons. It’s disturbing.
But I wanted you to talk about the objective here in keeping the American people in the constant state of anxiety and fear. What would be the purpose of that if it’s intentional? And it does seem, it is.
MEL GOODMAN: Oh, I think it’s intentional. And one of the pieces I wrote, I think about the megalomania—and I think he’s a megalomaniac—I quoted H. L. Mencken, one of my favorite journalists from my hometown who wrote for the Baltimore Evening Sun in the 1920s and ’30s. And he said then, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populists alarmed and hence Congress to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Well, a perfect example of that is this emphasis on Greenland and the threat that Russia and China represent to Greenland. There is no indication whatsoever that Russia or China have any interest whatsoever in Greenland. And the United States, which has the only power projection capability in the world—there’s no other country, no group of countries that has the power projection that the United States has.
China has one small military facility out of its own territorial space and that’s on the horn of Africa. And we were part of a community that encouraged China to come in to deal with piracy and the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. And Russia only has two small bases in Syria that are now threatened because there’s a great change in the political leadership of Syria.
The United States has hundreds of facilities all over the world, all over the world. And what our democracy has done and Trump is the worst example of this, but we’ve always exaggerated the threat to the United States and our security. When you think of our security situation geopolitically—oceans, east and west, friendly neighbors, of course he’s irritated those relations and worsened them with Canada and Mexico. But no other power has such a benign border situation as the United States. But over the years and I know this from my 25 years of the CIA, a battling particularly with military intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency, there was always a tendency to exaggerate Soviet power.
The Soviet Union throughout the 1980s was gradually and incrementally coming apart. And Pentagon intelligence and intelligence of other agencies as well were talking about the great Soviet threat. The Soviet threat was to itself. The U.S. arms race was basically with itself. There were no sophisticated arms comparable to what the United States had in the 1980s. And now we’re talking up the Chinese threat, not only to Greenland but Taiwan. It’s not clear that Xi Jinping is prepared to use military force to take Taiwan.
And frankly, from all the war games I played at the National War College and the Department of Defense and the CIA, we can’t protect Taiwan in any event. That’s why you need more diplomacy. But State Department doesn’t exist as a diplomatic entity. There’s really no National Security Council. You hear of no meetings whatsoever to discuss strategy. You have an incompetent politician who heads both these organizations, Marco Rubio, secretary of state, and the national security advisor, and he doesn’t seem to have claim to either one.
When you look at the citizens who are negotiating U.S. policies with regard to Gaza, which has been mishandled; with regard to Ukraine, which has been mishandled, these are led by two real estate brokers. One those is the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner and the other one is of his best friends, Sidney Witcoff.
So there’s really, in some ways—what’s really frightening is there is no government. It goes back to the European diplomats who I talked about saying they have no one to talk to. There are no assistant secretaries of any influence within the State Department. So what you then look for is, who is running this government? I don’t think it’s Donald Trump. But you do see the role of Steven Miller, who’s a serious threat to our democracy and has made that clear with his emphasis on the use of force. And then you have Russ Vought (now director of U.S. Office and Budget and architect of Project 2025) in the White House who I think is dictating domestic policy and economic policy to a great extent.
So we have this facade of a government. You have this disorderly president with his disorderly mind making decisions and then reversing himself and then contradicting himself and never being able to really explain himself. So there’s a lot to be concerned about.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Just a reminder for our listeners, as we’re speaking tonight here on Counterpoint with Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University, former CIA analyst and a national security correspondent with counterpunch.org. Mel, I wanted you to comment on what we heard from Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos.
But before I get to that, I just have to mention this astonishing thing that appeared in one of the most prominent Canadian newspapers. They put out an article, I’m sure you saw it, that the Canadian armed forces have modeled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and the country’s potential response, which includes tactics similar to those employed against Russia and later U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.
So they’re practicing, or at least on paper, they’re thinking about what happens if Trump sends U.S. troops over the border. He’s certainly threatened to make Canada the 51st state more than a few times. But here’s the thing I wanted to ask you about with Mark Carney. He was applauded widely for what he said at the Davos World Economic Forum, where he talked about really what we see from Washington today is an end of the rules-based international order that was agreed upon by the major Western powers after World War II.
I think he is really reading it quite right. But if the world is to reorganize in the future and the Europeans or the European Union could play an independent role in the world and not just say “me, too,” to everything the United States has said over many decades since the end of World War II, will that change the world for the better or the worse in your view?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, I think the more centers of power that we have can lead to a more stable situation. That’s why, if we’re going to reorganize the world order—and it hasn’t always been very orderly—you have to look at the United Nations, which Trump is trying to ignore, which has been a more useful international association than I think we give it credit for. So there have to be changes to the Security Council, the five permanent members of the Security Council, or really the five permanent members who represented the victors in World War II. Now you have a different arrangement of power and distribution of power. I think room should be made for India. Room should be made for Brazil. I think we should question the veto power that the superpowers have that prevent the United Nations from getting involved in international quarrels. So there is room for changing the international order, but you can’t do it if you have an authoritarian like Donald Trump who issues a national security strategy, which wasn’t given enough attention by the national media that really divides the world up in 19th-century style spheres of influence.
He’s essentially turned Eastern Europe over to Russia. He’s turned influence in the Indo-Pacific over to China and we can see what he’s doing in the Western hemisphere, which represents no threat to the United States whatsoever. What we saw in Venezuela was reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in which if we don’t like the internal order of a country, we just go in and kidnap their president. Maduro’s in jail now in New York. This can’t stand. Now what it has done is I hope has given an opportunity to the Europeans to get their own house in order because NATO has been fractured in a sense by its expansion. The eastern countries have one policy and the Western countries have another on basic issues. But I think now they all realize they’re threatened not only by Russia and the East, but by Donald Trump in the West.
And I think Carney was trying to appeal to them. And in the process, I believe he got a standing ovation at Davos for the remarks he made. And remember, Carney was not the favorite to win the election for prime minister in Canada in the first place. It was only because he took on Donald Trump in the campaign and there was such fear of Donald Trump even before the election that Carney was elected.
Trump really elected Mark Carney, which he’s done in other elections in other countries. So I think the world is waking up to the threat Trump represents. I’m not sure the United States is sufficiently alert. The turning point may be what we’re seeing now in Minneapolis because the protest movement continues to expand. What we’re seeing in Minneapolis could happen in any big city, particularly any sanctuary city and any sanctuary city in a blue state for that matter, because he’s gone after liberals and progressives the way Hitler went after Jews and communists in his first year. So it’s all reminiscent of fascism. The ICE are the SS troops in this. It reminds me of my work at the CIA when we studied the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in the Soviet Union, and it’s all very threatening.
SCOTT HARRIS: I did want to have one final question for you, Mel, and that is, you’re a student of history. You’ve seen how authoritarian governments have been overthrown sometimes using non-violence, peaceful protest. When we look at Donald Trump and his growing unpopularity and alarm across the country about what he might do next, and we have to remind ourselves, Donald Trump has the codes to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal— the most deadly on the planet. And I tell my friends, I said, we’ll be lucky to get through these next three years alive.
But if there is growing realization that Trump, for our own survival must be removed from power, can we look to the 25th Amendment? Really, it seems distant when you have sycophants surrounding Trump in the cabinet. Impeachment seems like a really high bar. How do you get two-thirds conviction for impeachment in the Senate in its current makeup? And then of course, you have mass disruption of the U.S. economic system. Wall Street seems to be the only thing that has been able to convince Trump to back away from his crazy policies. And what we saw in Minnesota with this general strike. It could be a blueprint for future action that could have more impact than what we’ve seen so far. Anyway, it’s a lot to discuss in just a couple of minutes, Mel, but I just wanted your thoughts on where we go from here. If we’re …
MEL GOODMAN: Well, to me, the country has to wake up to the threat and maybe Minnesota will be a turning point. Of course, the wish is father to the thought in my case, but that is what I’m hoping for. We need to be more active. We need to be more aggressive. We have to be on the street. We have to be counted. We have to support groups like Indivisible who were leading the way and fighting the Trump administration. But we have to realize how threatening this is that you have a megalomaniac in the White House, and he does have two buttons on his desk. One is to bring him Diet Coke and the other is to launch a nuclear war. I just hope he doesn’t confuse the two the way he did Iceland and Greenland. And that may sound a little hysterical, but this is someone we can’t trust.
Remember in the first term, he tried to do a lot of the things he’s doing now, but he was surrounded by people—particularly retired general officers who held him back. There’s no one holding them back now. Scott Bessett was a critic of some of his policies and I notice Scott Bessett, the secretary of treasury, has now gotten on board. Everyone in that administration, and it’s a group of incompetents and inexperienced people who don’t know how to lead. And there’s a freefall going on in domestic policy and economic policy. And the only thing that captures his attention, as you suggested, was the 800-point drop in the stock market when the Greenland situation looked very serious and he backed off immediately.
So we have to remain active. We have to remain vigilant. We have to recognize how threatening this situation is. That’s my only encouragement is what could happen in 2026, assuming there will be an election.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Mel, thank you so much for your perspective on these multiple crises we’re facing as a country and the world. And I much look forward to staying in touch with you to have your voice of reason on these airwaves again. So thanks for being here.
SCOTT HARRIS: You take care.
MEL GOODMAN: Keep up your good work.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Mel. Goodnight.
MEL GOODMAN: Goodnight.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and former CIA analyst.
