'Mad king' Trump already matched Nixon's 'self-destructive mania' —with years left: column

President Donald Trump is not going to stop his escalating parade of chaos, columnist Jamelle Bouie warned in his new analysis for The New York Times published on Wednesday — and America must survive another three years.

Bouie set the context by comparing what legendary journalist Bob Woodward wrote about the final days of Richard Nixon, a president who often forms a basis of comparison for Trump.

"As the walls closed around him and the pressure from allies and enemies alike became unbearable, Nixon grew 'increasingly unstable, obsessed, exhausted.' He didn’t sleep. He drank. He acted irrationally. His son-in-law and adviser Ed Cox said that Nixon was wandering the halls of the White House, 'talking to pictures of former Presidents — giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.'"

Whereas it took several years for Nixon to reach this level of "self-destructive mania," however, "President Trump has reached those depths with three years left on the clock," wrote Bouie. "For weeks, the president has been threatening the military takeover of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. His reasons amount to little more than greed and vanity; he wants to be known to posterity for the territorial expansion of the United States." Moreover, "it almost goes without saying that a U.S. attack on Greenland is ruinously unpopular with the American public," with 86 percent opposed in new surveys.

Trump finally backed down somewhat from his threats, which stood to blow up the NATO alliance, after his World Economic Forum speech — but the instinct that made him pick this fight is still there and still going to shape his every move in office.

And all of this tied into Trump's other lingering obsession, which is to get a Nobel Peace Prize — he explicitly told the Norwegian government in a furious letter that any U.S. invasion of Greenland is essentially on them for not giving him one.

"There is simply nothing for the Nobel committee to award or recognize. For Trump, this is unacceptable," wrote Bouie. "His response, as befitting his thuggish and gangster-like sensibilities, is to try to extort the government of Norway, and by extension Denmark, Europe and the rest of the world, into giving him what he wants."

"The uncomfortable truth is that the president of the United States is a man with the mind of a spoiled child," Bouie wrote, ominously concluding, "We have three years left with a mad king. It does not feel sustainable."