There's still some method to Donald Trump’s madness

Donald Trump’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly was both an echo of George W. Bush and something original. At times, one expected the president to lapse into a Texas drawl and warn about ‘nuclear weapons’; at others he was distinctly The Donald. Despite the seeming contradiction, it was a fairly cogent and consistent address; it also overflowed with the customary bombast.

Trump began firmly in carrot-top mode, gloating about how well the American economy had done since he was inaugurated. Then came an abrupt escalation: ‘Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists,’ Trump warned, ‘but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.’ The flashback was immediate: the ‘axis of evil’, war in Iraq, missing chemical weapons—everything he’d repudiated on the campaign trail by pledging to keep America out of foreign entanglements.