“I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn’t believe,” said Donald Trump, suddenly wistful as he recalled his the salad days when his mother would tell him, “Son, you could be a professional baseball player,” and he would reply, “Thanks, mom.” Carpe diem!
Not for the first time on Tuesday, the US president had veered wildly off topic. The point of this story was a “big building” that “loomed over the park” in Queens, New York, where he used to play little league baseball. When he asked why it had bars on the windows, she told him it was a mental hospital.
Trump, 79, a self-proclaimed “very stable genius” who keeps “acing” cognitive tests, made so many references to the “mentally insane” and “insane asylums” in the White House briefing room that it seemed like insecurity. It also gave cold comfort to a watching world that fears the future of the transatlantic alliance now lies in the hands of a modern Caligula.
Over more than an hour and a half, Trump marked his first year in office by reading a list of his accomplishments in a slow monotone as if deliberately torturing his old adversary, the media, who were crammed elbow to elbow. The list became as repetitive – and chilling – as Jack Torrance typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over in The Shining.
Trump threw in some wild zigzags, from “I love Hispanic” to naked xenophobia about Somalia, from the big lie that he won the 2020 election to a dismissal of former special counsel Jack Smith as “a sick son of a bitch”, from rebranding coal as “clean, beautiful coal” to renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of Trump” (the last one was a joke, he promised).
Along the way there was a surprise when he called ICE’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis “a tragedy” and “a horrible thing”, although perhaps not so surprising when he added that he recently learned that Good’s parents were “tremendous Trump fans”.
And as the president brandished a giant file – no, not Epstein – there was an unexpected battle with a paper clip. “Whoo!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad my finger wasn’t in that sucker. That could’ve dome some damage, but you know what? I wouldn’t have shown the pain. I would’ve gone back. Boy, did you hear that? That was nasty. But I would not have shown the pain. I would’ve acted like nothing happened as my finger fell off.”
So much for the stable genius. To sit in the crowded briefing room was like being on a bus full of commuters who realise the driver has yanked out the brakes and is laughing as they plunge downhill.
The humourist Tom Lehrer once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” It made a comeback when Donald Trump was offered the Nobel peace prize by the actual winner, María Corina Machado of Venezuela, and grabbed it like an eager schoolboy.
But he is still sore with Norway, a country he used to admire for sending – unlike Somalia – the right kind of immigrants. In a weekend message to Norweigian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump said he no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.
“Ended eight unendable wars in 10 months,” he insisted on Tuesday. “I should have gotten the Nobel prize for each war, but I don’t say that. I save millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, OK? It’s in Norway. Norway control the shots. It’s a joke. They lost such prestige.”
Everyone in Europe is asking: how could America elect the Joker and can the fate of global security really depend on the bruised ego of one man? Again, the commander-in-chief offered precious little by way of reassurance about his neocolonial ambitions. One reporter asked: “How far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?” The president replied: “You’ll find out.”
Another wondered if the break-up of the Nato alliance was a price worth paying for Greenland. Trump insisted: “Something is going to happen which will be very good for everybody.”
Good for Vladimir Putin, perhaps, whose dreams of driving a wedge between Nato allies are finally coming true.
At his inauguration, Trump had stood in the US Capitol rotunda proclaiming a new golden age of America as tech overlords looked on. One year on, he kept repeating himself in a soporific, almost slurring voice in the kind of discombobulated performance that would have had Republicans demanding that Joe Biden be yanked from office under the 25th amendment and committed to a mental institution.
Will anyone in Washington stand up and pull the emergency brake before it’s too late?
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