The madness of King Donald

Is it time to ask whether Trump 2.0 has crossed the boundary between being the 47th president of the United States and being a deranged, irrational, inconsistent, narcissistic figure who regards himself more as the nearest thing to an absolute monarch since George III lost the colony precisely 250 years ago? Or, increasingly, even the all-powerful ‘Emperor’ of the Western Hemisphere.

Almost daily, the legitimate questions jump out, the evidence mounts up and the pressure on European politicians and media to flag up those dangers becomes irresistible.

For Sir Keir Starmer, the challenges are particularly pertinent. The ‘Special Relationship’ on which he pins so much and his reputation as ‘The Trump Whisperer’ who can handle an unpredictable, erratic POTUS more skilfully than other leaders now hangs by the thinnest gossamer thread if it isn’t already severed beyond repair.

Take the emergency speech and press conference the prime minister staged in Downing Street on Monday in the wake of Trump’s draconian tariff ‘blackmail’ threat against the UK and seven other European NATO allies for not dancing to the president’s Greenland annexation demands.

Wisely, agreed the majority of the UK media and rival party leaders, the prime minister declared his full support for Greenland and Denmark’s rejection of Trump’s demand for it to surrender to US ownership, whether by selling out sovereignty in exchange for US dollars or facing an illegal potential military invasion.

But Starmer chose to do it relatively low-key without the counter £90 billion tariff threats and aggressive rhetoric several leading European political leaders had used in response to Trump’s own blackmail threats and demands. The prime minister expressed his belief in patient diplomacy and told questioning journalists that he didn’t believe Trump would actually ever seize Greenland by force, not a view widely shared by our European neighbours and among Democrats and some dismayed Republicans on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

Poor reward for softly, softly

So what was Starmer’s reward for his softly, softly diplomacy on Monday? By the early hours of Tuesday, President Trump unleashed an arguably unhinged assault on Britain, and by implication his ‘friend’ Starmer, on his Truth Social platform over the deal to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Ranting sarcastically and littered with his trademark capitals, Trump declared: “Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ NATO ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital US Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

“There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness. These are International Powers who only recognise STRENGTH, which is why the United Sates of America, under my leadership, is now, after only one year, respected like never before.

‘The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”

Quite apart from the geographical difference between Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Greenland in the Arctic, the ‘madness’ displayed in Trump’s rant lay in the fact that the president himself had been fully consulted, lauded the deal that gave a century-long lease on the critical Diego Garcia base the UK shares with the US.

The Truth Social outburst dropped like a bomb on an unsuspecting Number 10 and a hurried early hours statement countered: “The UK will never compromise on our national security. We acted because the base on Diego Garcia was under threat after international court decisions undermined our position and would have prevented it operating as intended in our future.”

It also begs the big question: How long can Sir Keir’s softly softly approach to Trump last with both his own restive backbenchers and in the court of wider public opinion. But whether Badenoch and Farage were smart to rekindle their own opposition to the Chagos deal in these circumstances is also open to question.

By breakfast on Tuesday, various ministers were dispatched to broadcast studios to tactfully point out the president had got his facts wrong, the deal had actually secured the base for Britain and the US and that Trump and his administration had approved it, with US Secretary of State Mario Rubio hailing it as “monumental”. Reinforced by archive footage of the president sitting opposite Keir Starmer in the White House singing its praises.

But more humiliation loomed for the prime minister following US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Tuesday night, accusing the UK government of “letting America down” over the Chagos deal. A dramatic volte face that hints Trump could yet try to block it going through. It’s no secret that both the Tory leadership and Nigel Farage have been lobbying the White House to do just that.

Rationalising the irrational

The only rational analysis of Trump’s irrational rant was that it came amid a stream of invective over his determination to have Greenland and that Greenland not Diego Garcia was the real motive for his anti-UK assault.

Trump also breached all diplomatic protocol in the same Truth Social post by publishing private correspondence from French President Macron and also UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Further provocation came with the post of a mocked-up image of Trump planting the US flag on Greenland and another reigniting his claim Canada should become the 51st state of the US.

Earlier in this mad passage of modern history, Trump had sparked global headlines by linking his repeated threats to seize Greenland with his perceived snub at not getting the Nobel Peace Prize he obsessively craves.

In an extraordinary letter last Sunday to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, the US president wrote: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” adding that the US needed “complete and total control of Greenland”. The 8-wars peace claim, of course, is a highly contentious claim in itself.

Not for the first time, it was politely pointed out to POTUS that a distinguished 5-strong independent panel NOT the Norwegian government decide the winner of the prize. To which came another Trump message effectively accusing them of lying, a response that undoubtedly speaks volumes about Trump’s deeply autocratic view of government.

Rules based order meets the ‘Orange King Baby’

The exchange invariably made front page leads on Tuesday for several UK nationals, including The Guardian and The Times with the former’s headline, ‘Trump links Greenland threats to Nobel snub’. Inside, The Guardian gave significance space to ‘Starmer says retaliatory tariffs against US would be ‘wrong thing to do’’. But on the opposite page, its award-winning political sketch writer John Crace took a different tack with ‘PM makes the error that the world can reason with an entirely unreasonable president’, making the valid point: “If this is the new shape of the rules-based order, then the west is falling apart before our eyes. It is everything presidents Putin and Xi dreamed of and more. They have licence to do as they please in Ukraine and Taiwan and all because the Orange King Baby in the White House is having a temper tantrum at not getting his own way.”

Gordon Brown’s verdict

The Guardian also carried a scathing guest op-ed from former prime minister Gordon Brown headlined, ‘The free world now needs a new plan – and new leadership’. He argued that, under Trump, the US has “abandoned its longstanding championing of the rule of law, human rights, democracy and the territorial integrity of nation states. Gone is the erstwhile support for humanitarian aid and environmental stewardship. Gone, too, is the founding principle of the postwar settlement: that countries choose diplomacy and multi-lateral cooperation over aggression and unilateral action… we cannot doubt any longer that the US president meant it when he said he ‘doesn’t need international law’.”

Tuesday’s Times led page 1 with, ‘I no longer think purely about peace, says Trump’ with, inside, political sketch writer Tom Peck reviewing the prime minister’s emergency speech / press conference under the headline: ‘Starmer spoke softly, but forgot the big stick’.

But the paper gave a significant page lead to ‘Republicans and US public go cold on Arctic mission’ – reflecting the polls showing the majority of the public don’t agree with Trump’s threats to forcibly seize Greenland and that non-devotee GOP politicians on Capitol Hill fear it could backfire badly in this year’s midterm elections and cost the party control of congress and possibly the senate too. Wall Street isn’t exactly happy over Trump’s new tariff war ‘strategy’ on the basis it could hit US markets and US consumers as much as the president’s European targets.

Could it yet be TACO time for Trump?

Little wonder, then, that on Wall Street and Capitol Hill, hopes are invested in reviving the ‘TACO’ acronym first applied to the president by the Financial Times columnist, Robert Armstrong, back in May… ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.

Tuesday’s main Times leader was headlined, ‘End of the Affair?’ and warned: “Europe’s leaders must think the unthinkable about a NATO without the United States. Even if the alliance survives the schism over Greenland, trust will be hard to rebuild.”

Back on Monday, the Daily Mail, which had initially hailed Trump 2.0 with gushing enthusiasm (not least from Boris Johnson) splashed on, ‘NATO NOW HEADING FOR DISASTER IN TRUMP ROW’ beneath its new ‘Greenland Crisis’ strapline. But it did indulge a Tuesday trip into the fatuous zone with Trump cheerleader-in-chief Richard Littlejohn offering: ‘I’d take Trump, warts and all, over our complete and utter lawyer of a PM. Maybe the US buying Britain isn’t such a crazy idea!’.

Trump’s America no ally now, warns top general

By sober contrast, it carried a guest column by General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander of NATO in Europe, headlined: ‘America is no longer our ally but a predator and a bully. My message to Europe’s leaders: Stick together and prepare for war’.

Inside Monday’s Mail, Andrew Neil’s column had predicted grimly: “Nato would never recover if Trump seized Greenland. These are dark times – and I fear we’ve not seen the worst of them.”

On his social media platform and Times Radio show, Neil went even further with: “For all of my life, Russia has tried to decouple Europe from America and break the North Atlantic Alliance. It never succeeded. Instead it lost the Cold War, leaving NATO more powerful than ever. But now success is staring the Kremlin in the face. All thanks to Donald Trump.”

The former Sunday Times editor and flagship BBC political show host also weighed in with this: “Trump’s so called ‘Board of Peace’ turns out to have nothing to do with Gaza after all. It now looks like some kind of global conflict resolution body to replace the UN. It will cost 1bn to join and be chaired by Trump, who would have extensive powers. Including a veto over decisions he doesn’t like. It is probably his most radical step yet to replace the post-WW2 global order. It will also be quite the dictators’ tea party. Putin, Lukashenko (Belarus Putin ally tyrant) and the dictator of Kazakhstan have all been asked to join.

It seems even more evidence of megalomaniac madness, or narcissist self delusion by the US president. It also begs several big questions. Could Tony Blair stay on in all conscience? Could Keir Starmer, after the last few days, accept the invitation heading his way? Can Zelensky accept the one Trump’s sending him given the unresolved murderous state of the Ukraine War with Putin a fellow board member?

Trumping the United Nations

The secretary general of the UN is already briefing that it smells like Trump’s attempt to usurp the UN, a body he has long despised. One senior UN official put it to me this way privately: “A peace board that costs a billion to join with Trump controlling the purse strings, sounds more like a Mafia shakedown to me.” While Anders Rasmussen, the Danish former head of NATO, did the broadcast rounds on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s arrival at the Davos World Economic Forum accusing the US president of being the “biggest threat to world peace”. Before leaving for Switzerland himself, Trump made a rambling, incoherent White House speech to boastfully mark the January 20th first anniversary of his second presidential term. It did little to quell growing speculation about his mental acuity.

There was surprise and mutterings of discontent on Labour’s back benches that Keir Starmer had decided not to attend Davos and join other NATO allies in confronting Trump – despite Nigel Farage being there in the hope of capitalising on his friendship with The Donald and boosting his own prime ministerial ambition.

One sceptical Labour MP and former minister put it to me this way: “If Keir is counting on other European leaders forcing a Trump U-turn with Britain benefiting in our absence, it will still look like cowardice with the PM running scared of calling out the president to his face. And it won’t do much to head off a leadership challenge after the May elections.”

The prime minister is also aware that if Trump ploughs ahead with sanctions and threats to invade Greenland, he will come under intense pressure to cancel King Charles’s April visit to the US to celebrate the former colony’s 250th anniversary and even Prince William’s summer attendance at the World Cup.

In fairness to Starmer, he used his absence from Davos to deliver his toughest criticism ever of Trump at Wednesday’s PMQs which coincided with the president’s plane landing in Switzerland. Several times, Starmer declared he “would not yield” to the president’s pressure on Greenland and effectively accused him of U-turning on the Chagos deal to ramp up the Greenland pressure. He accused Kemi Badenoch of “opportunism” by supporting his stand on Greenland while backing Trump on Chagos. Starmer also suggested opposition parties had been secretly pressing the US to ditch its support over Chagos. It was undeniably the PM’s strongest performance in weeks, brought loud cheers from the Labour benches and put the Tory leader on the defensive.

My screeching U-turn

Last Saturday, a funny thing happened to me on the way to a GB News camera and mic. It was meant to be a debate about the political story dominating British politics – the Jenrick defection furore, his ‘You’re a Traitor’ sacking by Badenoch and the Daily Mail’s dramatic front page that morning appealing for a Tory / Reform ‘Unite the Right’ peace pact.

But two minutes before we were due to go live, Trump dropped his tariff war nuke over Greenland. Cue: Screeching topic switch. But, having once known Trump well personally in his pre-presidential days, I did manage to slip in one attempt at a joke in an otherwise serious discussion: “You can elect a narcissistic real estate developer with an ego the size of Mount Rushmore to be president of the United States, you can’t take the real estate developer out of this president.”

I argued the point that – for this most transactional POTUS – bullyboy ownership of Greenland is everything rather than exploring the willingness of Denmark and its semi-autonomous territory to discuss agreements with its NATO partner for the US to re-establish the 20 military bases it had there during the Cold War. Plus its readiness to strike mutual commercial deals to exploit the rich mineral resources of the world’s largest island.

Come to think of it, how long before Trump demands that his face is added to the 60-foot granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Rosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved and immortalised in the National Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota? After all, he already insists on telling us he rates himself one of the greatest presidents in history!

Family feuds

Wednesday’s UK front pages were split between two different family feuds ahead of Trump’s Davos arrival. Some opting for the Beckhams woes while others focused on the geopolitical version. Of the latter, ‘Fix Your country, Trump tells Starmer’ led the Telegraph, ‘We’ll work something out, Trump tells NATO’ (The Times), ‘Europe condemns Trump threats on Greenland as ‘new colonialism’’ (The Guardian), ‘Rift with Europe deepens as Trump warns ‘no going back’ on Greenland’ (The Financial Times), ‘RAF and navy in talks to join NATO force in Arctic’ (the i). Although the Mail didn’t splash, it did carry an excoriating op-ed by Daniel Hannan, the former right-wing MEP who is now president of the Institute for Free Trade. The headline: ‘I can’t sugarcoat it. Trump’s a deluded megalomaniac who’s irreparably damaged the world order and increased the risk of war’.

D-day Davos?

To an extent, Canadian prime minister and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney had set the stark tone ahead of Trump’s Davos arrival with a global headline generating keynote speech warning: ‘The old-world order is not coming back’.

Calling it a “new reality” and without actually naming Trump but pledging his support for Greenland, he went on: “Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion. Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu. Great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.”

But the Big Trump Speech turned out to be another extended rambling exercise in narcissistic self-adulation that had fact checkers working overtime. At times he appeared to be talking to himself.

On Greenland, for example, throughout the speech he repeated the baseless claim that the US returned it to Denmark after the Second World War. While he said he wouldn’t use force to take Greenland, he demanded immediate negotiations to secure it for the US. With the thinly veiled threat – “We will remember you if you say no over Greenland”. So no sign he’s backing down on his determination to make it part of the US. Several times during his speech, he confusingly called Greenland ‘Iceland’ by mistake.

But it was a familiar grievance laden address that included repeated attacks on NATO, yet again expressed as if in the third person and as if the US isn’t the major partner in the organisation.

It was a speech riddled with familiar insults about Joe Biden and his discredited claim he was robbed of the 2020 presidential election and will be prosecuting those who robbed him of victory.

Danish leaders felt particularly insulted by Trump’s taunts given Denmark was one of the first NATO members to answer the US call for military support in Afghanistan after 9/11. In fact, Denmark lost more troops per capita than the US in the war there.

“You’d be speaking German” taunts Trump

Plenty of potshots at the ‘Fake News’ media and alleged European weakness tossed in, including the offensive trope if hadn’t been for America “you’d be speaking German and Japanese without us”. (How not to win friends among your allies, eh, Donald?)

Although polite applause greeted the end of Trump’s speech, it was noticeably far more muted than the reception Mark Carney got the day before.

But in another sense, the speech may be less important than the private meetings during his two-day Davos trip and the potential to persuade him some way toward the aforementioned ‘TACO’ tag. But it’s likely to be several days or even weeks before we find out whether Trump does or doesn’t pull back on his tariff war threat timeline against the UK and the seven other European allies refusing to buckle to his Greenland diktat.