Off His Trolley...

Look, the media really do have to stop 'sane washing' Donald Trump.  Lately, I've come across even otherwise sober outlets like The Guardian and the BBC discussing how Trump's erratic behaviour in terms of his foreign policy are down to him employing the 'Madman Strategy'.  The thinking goes that this approach -  which supposedly originated with Richard Nixon - involves deliberately coming out with crazy, sometimes contradictory statements, in order to keep your opponents on the wrong foot, never knowing what you will do next.  The idea is that this uncertainty can be used as leverage by negotiators and diplomats to get the other side to agree to their proposals as if they don't, the President might do something really crazy.  All of which seems to me to be a tortuous way of trying to give legitimacy to the chaos which surrounds Trump - it's really all deliberate, just you wait and you'll see it is all part of a cunning plan.  But the simpler explanation is that Trump behaves like a madman because he's off his fucking trolley.  He's completely unhinged and, thanks to the fact that he has packed his cabinet and inner circle full of yes-men (and women), all of whom are busy pursuing their own agendas under cover of his chaos, nobody is acting as a restraint upon the worst excesses of his madness.  I mean, just look at this last weekend, which saw him picking a fight with the Pope and depicting himself as Jesus in social media posts.  That's just not normal, now is it?

Trump's tirade against Pope Leo gives a clear indication of his mental derangement - he criticises the Pontiff for being 'soft on crime' and lambasts his 'foreign policy' as being 'weak on nuclear weapons'.  The first point seems to imply that Trump thinks that the Pope is Batman and personally goes out and beats up individual sinners by night.  The latter point implies that Trump thinks that the Vatican is some kind of nuclear armed superpower which should be using its nuke-backed spiritual superiority to impose some kind of Christian world order by force, rather than preaching peace and understanding.   All of which speaks of an entirely demented world view.  Which the media really should stop trying to cover up or, worse, trying to gaslight us over: there is no plan, no strategy, no grand scheme behind it all - he's just crazy.  Something which would have been plainly apparent to the US electorate if the US media hadn't spent the last presidential election campaign focusing on Biden's supposed mental decline and not sanitised Trump's speeches and public appearances, which were characterised by rambling, gibberish and irrationality, in their reporting.  But hey, the US press, (even more than the UK press), is owned by billionaires who had decided that Trump was 'their guy', the best vehicle for their ambitions and economic imperatives.  Well, they got their tax cuts, but everything else is shit - not just for the US, but for the rest of the world as well, (I recently nearly bankrupted myself putting fuel in the car, thanks to the out-of-control oil prices caused by Trump's insane war on Iran).  Perhaps the US electorate should consider this come the revolution and ensure that they string up those billionaires from lampposts, alongside Trump and his cronies.