NOW THAT the war with Iran is on pause, we can regroup and ask the important question: is Donald Trump mad or is it just that he’s from New York?
A while back I wondered if he might be going a bit screwy when he took to eulogising ‘the late, great Hannibal Lecter’ even though there is no reason to believe that the eminent psychiatrist is dead. No sanitised obituary in a learned medical journal. Nothing. What was he talking about? Was he covering for him? Is Lecter also mentioned in the Epstein files?
Then I thought he might be doing the thing some Mafia bosses do when they pretend to be crazy, partly for the purposes of evading the feds, but also as weaponised unpredictability. Trump is a New Yorker to the core, so this makes sense, that the erraticism is performative and utilitarian, rather than of any medical significance.
Then this happened.
This pretty much confirmed it. He’s not mad at all, but a skilled imitator of the legitimately insane apocalyptic rhetoric of the Islamist state which has been calling for the death of all Americans and Jews for many years now, and all in the name of their version of God.
Commentators who have tracked Trump’s unorthodox venture into the Washington world this last decade really should have cracked the code by now, and if they haven’t, they ought to recuse themselves from any future analysis. If they were serious about interpreting what he says, they’d have learned to speak New York.
There must be some fascinating academic work to be done on the semiotics and rhetorical value of Trump’s social media content. One of the chancers in the world of modern art could make a collection of his most bizarre posts and enter it for a Turner Prize.
When it comes to the war and Trump, it seems to me that the main options are (1) he went to war because he is mad; (2) he went to war sane and the war has driven him mad; (3) he’s quite sane and is (successfully) passing himself off as mad.
I’m going with (3).
Trump is more clear-eyed about the character and intentions of the Iranian political death cult than his many and by comparison Johnny-come-lately foreign policy critics, given that he’s been talking about it for nearly 50 years in pellucidly clear and very consistent ways, albeit in the idiom of a New York real-estate developer. That is the deeper narrative. Emphasising the capriciousness of his real-time social media misdirection is the shallower one.
Overwhelmingly, the critics base their conclusions on the latter.
It is genuinely insane, and culturally and religiously insensitive, to think of Iran as being just one more morally questionable interlocutor in the family of nations, difficult to deal with, sure, but to some degree amenable to the binding force of international treaty obligations.
And it is genuinely insane to think you can negotiate with a theocracy whose aims are eschatological and apocalyptic, and not temporal or material. This is a regime which is striving to get a nuclear weapon not to eliminate Israel but to bring about the end of the world.
Trump knows the value of language and that when you are dealing with people who speak in categories which are culturally and religiously incommensurate with your own the only place you can meet them, linguistically, is at the extremes.
Those who criticise Trump’s unpredictability or lack of clarity are the same people who do not notice when a clearly fascistic state is quite open about its own agenda. They are locked into the complacent mindset of Western liberalism, a worldview which lacks the moral and intellectual resources to treat with Islamic fanaticism.
Trump’s political opponents, and the Democrat Party specifically, have a strategy of their own, I have noticed: concede the principle of the intervention while at the same time dumping on its execution.
Thus, we have the Schumer types and predictable media grotesques lamenting the absence of any clearly articulated ‘exit strategy’. Truth is, if Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk and gave them chapter and verse on his intentions here, they wouldn’t listen to him. The Iranian regime, what is left of it, most certainly would.
I don’t know if this is a just war or not. But that is in any case a very different question from whether it’s compatible with ‘international’ law, the inevitably contingent and usually very depressing body of fake jurisprudence dictated more by the ambitions of the globalist set than by a real concern for the dignity of actual human persons.
The modus operandi,one of them, of the Iranian theocracy is aggression by proxy and so what counts as self-defence is less clear than when St Thomas Aquinas wrote of the theology of ‘just cause’.
But the suggestion that Trump is crazy is histrionic and lazy. The President’s public erraticism is a by-product. The underlying strategies and the deeper intentions of this administration, military and political, have a determinable teleology.
If you want to know what’s going on, look to the deployment patterns of US military assets. Not to the Wall Street and market-oriented distractions of the Commander in Chief. Entertaining though they are.
There are three vernaculars in play, and if you are fluent in any of them it makes it harder to understand the other two. You have the vapid and polite categories of diplo-speak; the jarring New York abrasiveness of Trump; and the eschatological and death-centred semantics of an Islamo-fascist theocracy.
I don’t think the language of Trump is the craziest of the three. I’m not even sure it’s the most interesting.
