More headlines from the disaster zone:

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, said he personally thanked President Trump on Saturday night for issuing a pardon that cut short the 22-year prison term he was serving in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Tarrio’s expression of gratitude came during a brief but extraordinary encounter with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Tarrio and his mother, Zuny Duarte, were invited to have dinner at the property by one of its members.

Happy Monday

The Department-Store God-King

by William Kristol

Why is Donald Trump’s second term so much more dangerous than his first?

There are several reasons, but here are two.

The first: Trump is worse than he was eight years ago. The second: Those around him now are worse than those around him then.

Trump has always been a narcissist. But what do you call it when success and power go to a narcissist’s head? Megalomania?

As Trump said in his recent interview with the Atlantic: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys . . . And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Now, most presidents wouldn’t say in the first place that they “run the country.” They might recognize that other branches of government play a role, and that other national institutions matter. They might grasp the fact that this is a free country, not one the president “runs.”

So the narcissism is jarring. But Trump’s self-described progression from “I run the country” to “I run the country and the world” seems to represent a progression from narcissism to megalomania. Running the world sounds . . . God-like.

Tariffs are one of the miraculous ways that Trump believes will enable him to run the world. As he explained to Time magazine:

You have to understand . . . I’ve made all the deals. . . . The deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. . . . So I will set a price.

What an image: The United States as Trump’s department store. It’s a store where he sets the prices, where neither Congress nor companies nor markets nor other countries have any say. It’s all him.

President Trump: the God-King CEO of the universal department store. It’s a vulgar Trumpian picture. It’s a picture of untrammeled power. It’s a narcissistic vision. It’s also a megalomaniacal one.

And let’s not forget the military parade planned for June 14, which providentially happens to be both Trump’s birthday and the birthday of the United States Army. The Army had planned a reasonably modest 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall. Trump is now demanding a large military parade—we must assume with the commander-in-chief looking down from on high on the reviewing stand.

And then there’s Trump’s oft-expressed wish to retake the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland—and for that matter Canada. Trump realizes that territorial expansion is a mark of a certain kind of powerful national leader.

Then there’s the matter of Trump’s aides. The people around Trump this time are far more sycophantic and far more authoritarian than those with him eight years ago.

Early in Trump’s first term it was the crazed Michael Flynn who was purged and Steve Bannon who was stopped from attending NSC meetings. In the second term, it’s the relatively sane Mike Waltz who is purged and Stephen Miller who attends NSC meetings. And Miller is now a strong candidate to become national security adviser, as Trump himself has confirmed.

In the first term, the relatively normal types prevailed for at least for a while in the internal struggles. For much of that term those aides and cabinet secretaries constrained a narcissistic Trump.

In the second term, we have sycophants like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Marco Rubio prostrating themselves before the megalomaniacal Trump. And we have authoritarians like Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Kash Patel encouraging Trump to even greater dreams of omnipotence.

We have a megalomaniac surrounded by sycophants and authoritarians.

This will not end well.

The Shiny-Objects Presidency

by Andrew Egger

Last Thursday, I wrote about Trump’s “crown-on, crown-off” routine: styling himself emperor of the universe one minute, insisting major questions about White House policy are above his pay grade the next. Over the weekend, we got another whopper in this department, courtesy of Trump’s Sunday interview with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press.

Does Trump think everyone in the United States deserves due process? “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much, right? “I don’t know,” the president repeated, adding that “it might say that” before going into a now-standard jag about the infeasibility of giving millions of migrants “tri