This morning I woke up to the news of Donald Trump, America’s (and as he prefers, the world’s) would-be King changing the 145-year old President’s desk of the Oval Office. Tabloids from across the world, as keen as they are to tart up their news items no matter how sleazy or untrue, purport the reason to have been Elon Musk’s son wiping down his booger on the edge of the table as his father was addressing the press beside him. Mr. Trump is a known germaphobe, but would he trouble provoking the ire of his closest mate? I’m circumspect about the conclusion many twitterati have reached at. Surely, the antics of a little unsuspecting boy cannot have been the only reason.
That said, with the American news-world in a quagmire and so too the rest of the world, I’m compelled to admit that Trump 1.0 was a mere apparition. Trump 2.0 is the real game. From calling Ukraine’s elected president a “dictator” to expressing thoughts of taking over the Panamas, and soon inducting Canada as the 51st state, to backstabbing India with tariffs despite his bonhomie with India’s Prime Minister, there’s much to relish (sadistically) and lament (realistically) about the Trump administration. I am reminded of a great turn of phrase a writer in the FT used to describe the madness surrounding Trump’s second presidency. He remarked, we have moved from viewing the madness as “boringly shocking to shockingly boring.” The madness has become par for the course in 2025. Normalcy has never felt so perturbing in the recent past. The progressives and liberals have become mute spectators, and to an extent innured, to this unravelling madness.
Why on earth is Europe, who has been doing its fair bit in the war against Russia, on the table for peace settlement? Why is the aggressor’s victim not a party to the talks? Two chums dishing it out in Riyadh — is that how it’s been planned? These are fairly commonsensical questions, but none of them matter to Trump, his whims and ego, and those who partake in it, including Marco Rubio. As a recent FT editorial put it, “if you’re not on the table, you’re on the menu.” If slicing up Ukraine to transfer bits and bobs to Russia (or maybe Kyiv too?) constitutes “art of the deal” for Mr. Trump, I’m afraid it’s a very poor deal. The aggressor isn’t being punished or shown its place.
The costs on Ukraine are mounting. Russia has been militarily advanced on the battlefield. Ukraine’s economy isn’t in great shape. In addition to a potential handover of territories to Russia, it has to exchange its mineral wealth with the US for its supposedly sumptuous military support. And good luck unearthing all those critical minerals, let alone export, because the contractor-local elite cobweb that controls the rare earth underground empire in Ukraine is one that will decades to untangle. By then, Trump will loafing at Mar-a-Lago. Baron Trump might take off from where his father left it, but would he? — a question for another day.
Liberal democracy is Europe’s biggest threat, yapped J. D. Vance at the Munich Conference. He has a bone or two to pick with the Europeans. It seems like a pet peeve of the members of this administration to speculate on Europe’s present and future. The extreme right in the continent is cosying up to Musk after his divisive comments. The latest in the pack is the Vice President of the US. The sparring with Rory Stewart about the basic tenets of Bible was entertaining indeed. He seems to be spending more time online pushing the anti-woke agenda than taking real, sensible action. Or perhaps, Musk and his teenaged DOGE boys are at it.
If anyone needed any convincing that intelligence is not a marker for common sense, and lesser still, for moral principles, Elon Musk is the case exemplar. It is astonishing how a man can seem so unhinged online and spearhead Tesla, Space X and now X itself to success. Four years ago he was tweeting in support of Ukraine. Power can transform people, more for the bad than good. I’ve long believed that history is linear, with every phase being an advancement over the previous, technologically, politically, intellectually, and socially. It appears that political moods are like fashion trends, cycling through bouts of despotism, fascism, statism, liberalism, and back again. The 60s baddies were reckless — remember Marianne Faithfull? — the much-derided boomers of this day. Now they’ve become the harbingers of extreme right-wing movements. Take Reform UK’s supporters, or simply those who attend anti-immigrant rallies. It will not be hard to find an 80-something gaffer stomping with the ferocity of again, might I say, a 60s baddie. War-devastated asylum seekers are at the receiving end of these diatribes. The 1990s economic order is in for a churn with Trump imposing tariffs on every country he dislikes, like a kid throwing confetti on everybody’s plate at a party. Will the madness be temporary – for four years – or could this set the world on a different course for the foreseeable future? The era of the modern-era king has only begun.
The Unsaturated Reader 