By Charlie Harper

It’s not just an American parlour game anymore. It has spread right across the world. Everyone is trying to get inside the mind of the man who has simply taken over the global consciousness.

Columnists and opinion writers and even beat reporters writing in America’s journalistic opinion leader are seemingly vying with each other each week to offer the wisest, freshest, most clarifying insights into the amazingly unorthodox mind of US President Donald J Trump.

Every day, the New York Times is full of new insights about the president.

Up north in Canada, Trump has single-handedly turned upside down an election once so likely to return the Conservative Party to power in Ottawa that former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned just a few weeks ago in order to give his beleaguered party a somewhat improved chance in Monday’s election. Things really looked bleak for the Liberals just six weeks ago.

Then Trump strode onto the scene, blathering on about annexing Canada, complaining about high Canadian tariffs on some US goods, ranting about the American trade deficit with Canada, and discretely clinging to resentment of both Justin Trudeau and his father Pierre, an earlier Canadian Prime Minister.

Both men, with their urbane, suave sophistication and noticeable overtones of haughty superiority over the brash American TV star turned politician, are clear antipodes to Trump. Both Trudeaus have offered evidence of their scorn for him, and Trump remembers.

It seems quite reasonable to assume that Trump’s antipathy toward the Trudeaus is playing a part in his behaviour and attitudes toward Canada.

Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former central banker and neophyte politician who replaced Trudeau in March of this year, has been saying on the campaign trail that “There is no going back. We in Canada will have to build a new relationship with the United States.”

Carney is emerging as a central figure in the global response to Trump’s tariffs. Buttoned-down and almost anonymous looking, Carney is a Harvard and Oxford-educated economist who is the only person to have run two different central banks — in England and Canada. He had never previously held elected office of any kind prior to last month.

But in poll after poll, Canadians showed they believe Carney will be best suited to confront and deal with Trump and his explicit, existential threat to Canadian sovereignty. And early returns from the Maritime Provinces pointed to the victory Carney and the Liberal Party achieved.

Carney has said his first foreign trip as Prime Minister would be to London and Paris – not Washington, where most of his predecessors have put at the top of their travel agendas.

No doubt he will discuss Ukraine with his European hosts. Trump’s empty boast to end the war on his first day in office has long since been exposed as worthless. In most of his first 100 days in office, Trump has stuck with his inexplicable fascination with Vladimir Putin, whose appeal to the American showman may have its basis in canny flattery.

Trump’s self-centred narcissism also plausibly informs his attitudes toward Ukraine. Trump remembers. And so can we, as we recall back in the summer of 2019. Then just past the mid-point of his first term, Trump was looking for ammunition to damage his likely 2020 opponent Joe Biden.

On July 25, 2019, Trump called Ukraine’s recently elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Many details about this story emerged in Trump’s subsequent impeachment investigation and trial in the US Congress. The core of the issue was that Trump promised to release two hundred and fifty million dollars in stalled US military and economic assistance for Ukraine if Zelensky would agree to launch a corruption investigation into matters involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump’s behaviour seemed to be a brazen attempt at extortion.

Zelensky wouldn’t agree to the president’s deal. And Trump remembers. His resentment of the Ukrainian leader, who for most of the past six years has been among the most widely-admired leaders in the world, is likely still simmering. Perhaps it triggered the grotesque outburst between the two men and US Vice-President JD Vance in February during a routine photo op in the White House.

Trump doesn’t need dirt on Biden now. He cannot run for president again. There is no pressure on him to win again.

And yet Trump persists in slyly hinting that his staff may have discovered a loophole in the US constitution that would enable him to run for president once more. We’ve discussed here in past months how that cannot happen – politically or legally. Still, Trump keeps taking about the possibility.

Why? It’s probably because Trump must hate the idea of becoming what the Americans call a “lame duck”. That’s a politician who is term-limited, cannot run for reelection, and thus risks the kind of creeping irrelevance that can vex politicians and others prominent in public life like nothing else.

They most fear being forgotten but not gone.

Trump probably cannot stand the idea that at some point in the next year or so, all the Republican politicians who now continue to fawn over him will realise that he will be out of office before he can again exert much influence over their political future. At that point, they might stop obeying him.

That’s not true yet. Trump still can credibly threaten rebellious GOP Congressmen and Senators with an expensive, debilitating and possibly destructive primary race for the Republican nomination for another term in office.

Sometime around next year’s November elections, however, that is likely to change. And when it does, the volume of Trump’s bombast about running for a third term will increase. He will cling to power like few others.

Meantime, there’s plenty of evidence that the president is much happier in his second term in office. In an interview this week with influential on-line magazine The Atlantic, Trump revealed himself, candidly, like he used to do in his first term with Washington Post editor and former Watergate journalistic hero Bob Woodward.

Trump says he is “having a lot of fun” as he reflected on how his second administration feels different from the first as he nears his 100th day in office.

“The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys around me,” he said.

Trump has expressed regret about some of the choices he made for top roles in his first administration. Installing loyalists in those roles was a top priority for Trump in his second term.

“And now, on the second time around, I run the country and the world.”

The Atlantic reported that people both inside and outside the White House feel that Trump is enjoying his job more than during his first term. The president told the journalists he agreed with that assessment.

“The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘let’s blow this place up’,” a Trump ally said. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye,”

Expanding on a practice embraced and expanded recently by Barack Obama and Biden, Trump has taken broad, unilateral executive actions on a range of issues since returning to office in January. Trump’s actions on immigration and trade have attracted the most attention. These executive actions effectively bypass Congressional oversight.

On trade, Trump sparked backlash globally by announcing tariffs on most countries, including top US trading partners, although he has paused some of the country-specific levies until July. His helter-skelter action on trade has shaken global markets and raised economic anxiety.

While speaking with The Atlantic, the president also returned to his habit of commenting on the possibility of a third bid for the White House.

“It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do,” Trump teased.

Overall, Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second term in office testing the limits of his executive authority, redefining the role of the US in the world, slashing the size of the federal government, while trying to change the US and global economic system.

The president said “You know, what I do is such serious stuff,” the president said.

No careful observer would disagree that what a US president does is “serious stuff”. Maybe it shouldn’t be so much fun.