Ever drop a Mentos in a carbonated drink and watch it bubble over? High-minded types used the reaction as part of a model volcano; stoners and other reprobates reveled in the mess that the chemical process created.
I’ve been thinking about that old trick as I contemplated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements. He’s talked about making Canada the 51st state, taking Greenland from Denmark, retaking the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
All reconfirm Trump’s penchant for shoot-from-the-hip pronouncements, his indifference to norms of diplomacy and readiness to let the rest of the world think him untethered to reality as we know it. For some — perhaps the president-elect, it isn’t clear — this unpredictability is strategic.
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