‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out.
So it’s unsurprising that in the world of commentary a whole industry has now arisen in search of an ‘explanation’ of Donald Trump’s various démarches concerning, for instance, Gaza, Greenland and Canada.
And now he’s trying to wreck world trade.
Academic economists have been hauled from their ivory towers, business journalists from their statistical charts, public opinion pollsters from their psephological scrutinies, and even child psychiatrists from their textbooks on infant development, to make sense of the US President’s decrees, speeches and obiter dicta for a bewildered world.
I have especially enjoyed the valiant efforts of fellow journalists on financial pages to find the rationale (if not the wisdom) behind a large nation slapping massive tariffs on its allies and trading partners. There have been charts, forecasts, modellings – all designed to guess or suggest what the President hopes to achieve and why, and to assess his chances of success.
A favourite answer to the apparent riddle of a man who appears able to believe (and say) six impossible things before breakfast has been that Trump must not be taken literally. Another is that ludicrous demands are part of the negotiating strategy of a ‘transactional’ dealmaker. And still the explanations, some more plausible than others, come. Keep them coming, chaps.
But what if Trump has just gone bonkers? Literally bonkers? What if no other explanation is needed? What if we behold an old man who, as he approaches 80, is simply losing his mind? What if a kind of early-onset (and not all that early) senile dementia is taking place?
After all, Joe Biden isn’t much older than Trump.
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