Donald Trump’s war is driving me mad
Who’d be a war reporter? The past two weeks of conflict in Iran have stretched the bounds of scrutability for even the most hardened journalists on the geopolitical beat. Led by the US and Israel, this war has now spread to 14 countries without having been satisfactorily designated as a war by its architects. Its aims have not been usefully pursued. How could they be, given that senior Trump officials have offered at least six separate and contradictory rationales for the bombings, and Trump himself has vacillated between saying the war is all but over, to saying the US military can make it last “forever” and that he’ll know it’s truly done “when I feel it in my bones”.
Amid this fog, the sensible moderates are left to pick through the humming dross for motes of sense. Much has been made of the US’s bizarre misjudgements regarding the Strait of Hormuz, through which 11 per cent of all the planet’s sea trade passes, including 20 per cent of its oil and gas. How, they ask, was Iran’s control over this bottleneck – and thus its ability to paralyse trillions of dollars of global trade with a fleet of weaponised dinghies – unconsidered? These are serious questions. It’s just that, to my mind, they’re more serious than the administration tasked with answering them. One key to making this point has nothing to do with Trump’s war abroad, nor the ongoing carnage of his policies at home, but a collection of shiny and ill-fitting mens’ shoes.
If you’re not aware, it was reported last week that Trump is so enamoured with discount shoe brand Florsheim, that he’s bought pairs for every man on his staff, even going so far as to eyeball their shoe size and dispatch them to their new owners, unfitted. Said staff are now reportedly so terrified of offending him, that they constantly wear these cheap, ill-fitting shoes any time they’re in his presence. There followed a bewildering series of photos; of Trump flanked by flunkies parading their identical shiny brogues; of staffers posing, feet facing camera, with thumbs-up from their boss; of Secretary of State Marco Rubio – one of the most powerful man on the planet – making the case for Trump’s region-destabilising war in Iran while wearing shoes at least two sizes too big.
I suppose it was the sheer, petty oddness of this story that made it clear to me that sense will not help us here. The thousandth reminder that we are not witness to the actions of a merely eccentric or unpredictable administration, but the abject and absurd demands of a Mad King.
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Trump has always been weird, but listing even a fraction of the oddest things he’s done during his second term makes you sound like a lunatic. Luckily, I’m willing to shoulder that burden for us both. His habit of constantly sleeping in televised meetings would be striking thing to witness in any commander-in-chief, let alone one who’s spent years mocking his predecessor as “Sleepy Joe Biden”. When awake, his speech – often slurred – now meanders to stranger plains than ever; his recurring obsession with the novelty of the word “groceries”; his starkly baffling soliloquies about whether or not he’ll go to heaven when he dies; his repeated explorations of sharks and electrocution; his apparent belief that Hannibal Lecter is a real person.
If some of his obsessions are too inscrutable to parse, others are more worryingly deducible. It seems likely his claim that migrants are swarming into America from mental hospitals, derives from his misunderstanding of the term “asylum”. Similarly, this week’s constant references to the Iran conflict as “an excursion” only make sense once you imagine him mishearing the word “incursion”, and mistakenly using a word that means “holiday” to describe a war that’s killed thousands of civilians, and destabilised the entire Middle East.
Every example I’ve given here has been reported by mainstream media outlets, often by appalled and horrified journalists who find them worrying, even disqualifying, for someone in high office. The problem is that those very same sensible moderates, who crowd our news segments with tales of Trump’s oddball antics, spend the rest of their time sane-washing the equally bonkers policies Trump pursues, supported by a Secretary of Defense who advocates heinous acts of war, promoted by AI-generated meme videos from official White House social media accounts.
If it’s undignified for Starmer, or Johnson before him, to toady up to Trump as he tramples over international law, we can at least appreciate the diplomatic necessity for political leaders to play nice with a foreign superpower, however erratic or unpleasant they might be. No such fig leaf can be granted to party leaders like Nigel Farage or Kemi Badenoch, however, both of whom openly court Trump’s approval, and routinely express their desire to bring his defence, culture and immigration policies to British soil, and seem happy to pitch this to a voter base aware that the American president thinks paracetamol causes autism and windmills kill birds. Nor does it absolve pliant journalists, such as the Telegraph’s Robin Aitken, who last Thursday launched a jeremiad against the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen for – I hope you’re sitting down – accusing Trump of lying when he said that US Tomahawk missile which killed 165 schoolgirls was launched by the Iranian military.
The things that make Trump grotesque are not his personal peccadilloes, but his political actions. The craven self-enrichment he’s pursued through scams large and small, his administration’s gutter-level racism, its constant assaults on personal dignity and free speech, the imprisonment and torture of thousands of people by Ice, the cutting of every government department to the bone, the arguably genocidal annihilation of international aid, the actually genocidal backing of Israel’s war in Gaza, and their current pursuit of a war in Iran that risks killing tens of thousands of people, while destroying the global economy and what used to be called the rules-based international order.
As such, focusing on Trump’s surface-level weirdness might seem like an unearned holiday from considering his more pressing evils. It’s just that I’d argue that these are all connected, and always have been. That Trump’s actions and his demeanour are one and the same. That his are the politics of a braying, small-minded simpleton, enacted by a man who simply can’t pretend to be anything else. That a man with a toddler’s approach to truth, object permanence, and the value and complexity of other people’s lives, is not someone who should be entrusted with access to a website for discount shoes, let alone the largest military arsenal the world has ever seen.
It behoves us to look at the unchecked malice and incompetent violence being meted by this administration, not as the behaviour of a pugnacious yet effective superpower, but as the actions of a weird, unstable tyrant. A giant freak. A Mad King. One we should never have normalised, but one which each insane outburst and totalitarian whim should drive us further away from. We should not be afraid to call out a maniac when we see one. If, as they say, the shoe fits…
[Further reading: Cyprus, Iran and the long 20th century]
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