MICHAEL BASSETT: PRESIDENT TRUMP

The other evening I watched President Trump on the BBC News holding a press conference in Qatar. The cameras kept rolling for the better part of 30 minutes. It was an unparalleled opportunity to observe the presidential mind at work. He took questions from reporters, but it wasn’t clear whether he heard what was being asked. In response to every question he started talking and blathered on and on, staying on no subject more than a few seconds as he prowled around a range of issues. Scarcely any part of what he said was linked in any way to the question he’d been asked. I formed the impression that the president has a mind like scrambled egg. I doubt he has ever been a regular reader of newspapers or a listener to TV except perhaps to his beloved Fox News which, while it loves Trump, is also inclined to incoherence.

Having had a feeble formal education, Trump lacks knowledge in many areas. If he’d kept abreast of the news over the years there is no way he could have concluded – for instance – that Ukraine started the conflict with Russia, or that it was preventing a solution. The newspapers and even American security briefs that were available to us via the media, told everyone willing to find out, that Russian troops had been prowling Ukraine’s borders and were believed to be preparing to invade before they actually did in early 2022. How did Trump miss all that? What has made the president prone to believe Vladimir Putin ahead of Volodymyr Zelensky? Why is Trump prepared to accept the invader’s version of events rather than the victim’s? Ignorance is the kindest possible explanation. I’ve seen other much less charitable explanations.

My scrambled egg theory explains not only the president’s behaviour when he opens his mouth, but also his recent conduct over the imposition of tariffs on other countries. One minute they are 10%, then 45%, then 145% before being delayed for a week or two and then reduced arbitrarily back to 10%, or whatever figure rattles through Trump’s chaotic thought processes. Some are purported to be permanent, others for 90 days….

I’ve never known a time in my life when there was so much uncertainty about international security. Since 20 January 2025 no country retains any sense of predictability about its relationship with the United States. Everyone lives in a state of unease about what the president might say or do next. Which, of course, is how Trump likes it. He’s perfected the art of being the centre of attention. My mother used to say of a narcissistic neighbour: he thinks he’s “the big I Am”.

As a student of modern American political history, I can say with certainty that there is no precedent for Trump. No one questioned the mental state of Democrats Franklin Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, nor Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or either of the Republican Bushes. One didn’t have to agree with any of them to be able to detect what they stood for, nor what the position of the United States was on any particular issue. That’s no longer the case. Occasionally some devotee of Trump’s regime tries to explain his behaviour. In a recent issue of the Economist, Paul Dans, leader of Trump’s transition plan, explained the president’s chaos: he “had to smash the system in order to build a better one”. In particular, his bullying of Ivy League universities was because the American left had seized near-complete control of them. Those who despair about the woke behaviour of our own academic institutions can understand this. However, this doesn’t explain Trump’s attack on so many aspects of American life. There was nothing disciplined or coherent to the ramblings I saw on the BBC.

Coming on top of the revelation in a new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about the infirmities of Joe Biden in his last two years in office as family, friends and leading Democrats conspired to shield their president from full public view, the wider world has every reason to worry about America’s democratic process. Two presidents in a row who are unfit for office? Has it been an accident, or a reflection of the state of mind of a majority of Americans who voted for them?

This matters when we realise that when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold. The world’s stock markets shudder, world trade is disrupted, and security arrangements are called into question at the thought the world’s leading nuclear power is going rogue. There are still three more years and eight months to go before Trump finally shuffles out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are a few tentative signs that his fellow Republicans might yet rebel against aspects of his presidential chaos, but don’t count on it. Knowing so little about the US Constitution, Trump occasionally muses about running for a third term. But on that score, we can safely sleep in the knowledge that it won’t happen.

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