What explains it all? How are you making sense of the turmoil one man has unleashed on the world? How, in the space of five short weeks, have we come to the pass where our staunchest ally now attacks, ridicules, denigrates and punishes its friends while aligning itself with a former sworn enemy?
How have we come to the abrupt realisation that, contrary to previous received opinion, day is in fact night; and black, in reality, white? And that if Donald Trump so decrees, rivers run uphill and the sun sets in the east?
Perhaps you are having the same private thoughts as everyone else, though we must all bear in mind that—in another first—we have an American president who likes to sue people who say disobliging things about him. So I should make it plain from the outset that there is no suggestion in anything that follows that I believe anything other than that the 47th president of the United States is an upstanding, intelligent and entirely admirable man.
Nevertheless, I have heard it suggested that, contrary to the flag under which he sails, our current president is not, for instance, a very good negotiator. In conventional theory, expert negotiators do not make sweeping concessions before they have even arrived at the table. Yet, with Ukraine, that is how Trump appears to have played his cards.
It is possible, in other words, that Trump is a bit stupid.
This, as signalled above, is not at all what I think. Quite the contrary.
A second theory I have heard is that, if not exactly stupid, Trump is maybe “not all there”. He is, after all, the second oldest person to hold the office of president—and the gerontocratic reign of Joe Biden was not itself widely admired. Maybe, it is suggested, Trump struggles in the way many seniors do and is easily muddled. Though three years younger than his predecessor, he can’t remember whose side he is supposed to be on.
I think we can agree this is a baseless attack on an articulate and highly alert public servant. As for the contemptible suggestion that he is an out and out crackpot—and how refreshing, in these post-woke days, that we need no longer mince our language!—I will not dignify such a slur with a comment. It is plainly absurd.
Then there are those to argue that he really means what he is doing and really doesn’t care what the rest of us living in, say, random countries think. We should learn to suck on it—preferably using a plastic straw. There is, in other words, a method in his madness, and when I say that I should emphasise that this is a figure of speech and absolutely not a reflection on the mental competence of a man who is, as I have said, obviously extremely sane.
The final theory floated by wild conspiracy theorists is that Trump is some kind of Russian asset. I cannot say how absurd this is and, for the avoidance of doubt—as lawyers like to say—do not believe one jot or tittle of it.
And yet one must admire the creative effort that lies behind this baseless conjecture. It is, after all, the most cinematically satisfying of the theories. To paraphrase Trump’s eloquent words after humiliating Volodymyr Zelensky, it would make great television.
Imagine the show. A sleazy New York property tycoon—calm down lawyers! this is FICTION!—travels to Moscow in the 1980s in search of deals and is targeted by the KGB. Routine spy stuff.
There’s a bog standard honeytrap: you’ve seen the movies—bugged hotel rooms, escort girls, covert footage. The footage goes into a safe deep in the bowels of the Lubyanka Building. All in a day’s work for the cold-eyed agent assigned to the case. Let’s call him Vladimir.
That’s series one and we’re now on series three. The plot has well and truly jumped the shark and the tycoon is now president of the United States and Agent Vladimir is now president of Russia.
You see, the theory is laughable. Can you imagine a junior script editor at Netflix or Disney+ wasting more than five minutes on such a pitch? And yet—Google it if you dare—there are people out there who persist in promoting these obviously untrue things about a man whom—and we have his own word for it—God saved from assassination so he could serve.
You can trace the germ of this fantasy back to a 2017 dossier on Trump commissioned from a former spook from some random country, one Christopher Steele. It cannot be said often enough that everything in this laughable report was untrue.
We know this because Donald Trump himself is recorded as having denied the most salacious allegation in the dossier. In October 2021 Trump volunteered to a roomful of Republican donors that his sexual kinks did not involve being peed upon.
If you wonder why, unprompted, he made this unusual statement it was said to be because Steele was about to grant his first major TV interview and that Trump wanted to “prebut” the most outrageous claims Steele had included in his dossier.
The Washington Post, which obtained a recording of the event, reported Trump as telling the donors: “I’m not into golden showers.” (Please Google it if you have to.)
He added: “You know the great thing, our great first lady—‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’”
You see, it’s near certain that Melania didn’t believe a word of it. And why should she, knowing Trump to have been brought up as a devout Presbyterian and with never so much as a whisper about her husband behaving less than respectfully around all women?
Still, that wasn’t enough to silence the people who will never give Trump the benefit of the doubt, including former FBI director James Comey, who said: “I remember thinking, how could your wife think there’s a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow? I’m a flawed human being, but there is literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think there’s only a 99 percent chance you didn’t do that?”
No wonder Trump fired him.
So, yes, it might make “great television” for our fictional president to live in fear that the Russians might release kompromat that would destroy him in series four. And that that would explain why he decided to throw in his lot with Comrade Vladimir. But I emphasise that I do not believe it, any more than I believe in the Loch Ness monster or the tooth fairy.
Furthermore, it must be added the Mueller Report into supposed Russian collusion into US politics officially footnoted that the spiciest claims in the Steele Report were “unverified”.
That leaves us none the wiser to understand what on earth is happening. Like the fate of the Ark of Covenant or the disappearance of Flight MH370 we may never know.
Your will remember that in series 12 of The Simpsons it is revealed that, as a child, Homer Simpson accidentally lodged a crayon into his brain, lowering his IQ to 55. This seems as plausible as any other working hypothesis at the moment. Though I should make it plain that I am in no way comparing President Trump with Homer Simpson.
The president, in my honest opinion, is a sane, balanced, towering genius and let that be an end to it.
