Who would be a war reporter? The last two weeks of conflict in Iran have stretched the limits of control for even the most hardened journalists in the geopolitical fray. Led by the US and Israel, this war has now spread to 14 countries without being satisfactorily termed a war by its architects. His purposes have not been usefully pursued. How could they be, given that top Trump officials have offered at least six separate and conflicting reasons for the bombing, and Trump himself has vacillated between saying the war is over, saying the US military can make it last “forever” and that he’ll know it’s really done. “When I Feel It in My Bones”.
Amidst this fog, sensitive moderates are left to pick through the humming dross for points of sense. Much has been made of the strange misjudgments of the US regarding the Strait of Hormuz, through which 11 percent of all the planet’s maritime trade passes, including 20 percent of oil and gas. How, they ask, was Iran’s control of this barrier – and thus its ability to paralyze trillions of dollars of global trade with a fleet of gunboats – overlooked? These are serious questions. It’s just that, in my opinion, they are more serious than the administration tasked with answering them. A key to making this point is not about Trump’s war abroad, nor his ongoing policy carnage at home, but a collection of shiny, ill-fitting men’s shoes.
In case you’re unaware, it was reported last week that Trump is so enamored with discount shoe brand Florsheim that he’s bought pairs for every man on his staff, even reaching as far as their eyeballs and sending them to their new, ill-fitting owners. Said staff is now said to be so terrified of offending him, who constantly wear these cheap, ill-fitting shoes whenever they are in his presence. A series of startling photos followed; of Trump surrounded by puppies parading their identical shiny brogues; of employees posing, feet facing the camera, thumbs up from their boss; of Secretary of State Marco Rubio — one of the most powerful men on the planet — making the case for Trump’s region-destabilizing war on Iran while wearing shoes at least two sizes too big.
I think it was the great and small strangeness of this story that made it clear to me that understanding will not help us here. The thousandth reminder that we are witnessing not the actions of a merely strange or unpredictable administration, but the absurd and preposterous demands of a mad king.
Subscribe to the New Statesman today for just £1 a week.
Trump has always been weird, but listing some of the weirdest things he’s done during his second term makes you look like a lunatic. Fortunately, I am willing to shoulder that burden for both of us. His habit of constantly falling asleep in televised meetings would be startling to witness in any commander-in-chief, let alone one who has spent years mocking his predecessor as “sleepy Joe Biden.” When awake, his speech—often slurred—now wanders into stranger realms than ever; his recurring obsession with the novelty of the word “food”; his incredibly strange soliloquies about whether or not he will 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 elusive to analyze, others are more disturbingly deducible. It seems that his claim that migrants are flooding into America from mental hospitals stems from his misunderstanding of the term “asylum”. Similarly, this week’s constant references to the Iran conflict as “an excursion” only make sense when you imagine him mishearing the word “incursion” and misusing a word that means “party” to describe a war that has killed thousands of civilians and destabilized the entire Middle East.
Every example I’ve given here has been reported by the mainstream media, often by horrified and horrified journalists who find them troubling, even disqualifying, for someone in high office. The problem is that the same sane moderates who fill our news segments with tales of Trump’s outlandish shenanigans spend the rest of their time speculating about Trump’s equally delusional policies, backed by a Secretary of Defense who defends horrific acts of war, promoted by AI-generated meme videos of White House officials on social media.
If it is unseemly for Starmer, or Johnson before him, to stand up to Trump as he violates international law, we can at least appreciate the diplomatic imperative for political leaders to play nice with a foreign superpower, however messy or unpleasant they may be. However, no such fig leaf can be given to party leaders like Nigel Farage or Kemi Badenoch, both of whom openly seek Trump’s approval and routinely express their desire to bring his defence, culture and immigration policies to British soil, and seem happy to present this to a voter base aware that the US president thinks paracetamol causes autism and coots. Nor does it excuse mild-mannered 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 the US Tomahawk missile that killed 165 schoolgirls was fired by the Iranian military.
The things that make Trump grotesque are not his personal peccadilloes, but his political actions. The damning self-enrichment he has pursued through frauds large and small, the low-level racism of his administration, the constant attacks 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 debatable genocide in the de facto genocidal annihilation of Israel, in the de facto genocidal destruction of Israel. 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 the rules-based international order.
As such, focusing on Trump’s surface-level weirdness can seem like an unearned celebration of his more pressing vices. I would simply argue that these are all connected and always have been. That Trump’s actions and behavior are one and the same. That his is the policy of a shrewd common man, enacted by a man who simply cannot pretend to be anything else. That a man with an infant’s approach to truth, object permanence, and the value and complexity of other people’s lives is not someone who should be trusted with access to a discount shoe website, let alone the largest military arsenal the world has ever seen.
It is up to us to look at the unchecked malice and incompetent violence this administration is facing, not as the behavior of a tough but effective superpower, but as the actions of a strange and unstable tyrant. A giant freak. A Mad King. One that we should never have normalized, but every crazy outburst and totalitarian whim should have driven us further apart. We shouldn’t 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)
Content from our partners
