The Independent has never been under any illusion about this American president. As our world affairs editor Sam Kiley writes, Donald Trump’s “infantile” folly in the Middle East has strengthened outlaw nations Russia and Iran, while “locking America into another forever war”.
The United States, and the world, survived Mr Trump’s first term in the White House in reasonable shape. Although he revels in his unpredictability, it was hard to imagine quite how perverse he would be in his second.
In recent weeks, he has laid about America’s longstanding allies with the irresponsible abandon of, as Kiley puts it, “a toddler with a chainsaw”.
Mr Trump has insulted South Korea, cutting joint military exercises, while doubling down on his admiration for the North Korean dictatorship. He has pulled out of trade talks with Canada after making impossible demands to limit Canada’s ability to make deals with other countries, and to protect the French language.
In a fit of megalomaniac pique, he decreed that Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America” – and lobbied Apple into changing its maps accordingly.
Closer to home, Mr Trump has said US support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands is “one of many” issues under review, which he appeared to believe was a way of putting pressure on the UK government to increase military spending further.
It was an outrageous and unprincipled comment, contrary to decades of American respect for the principle of self-determination. Yet it is the sort of nonsense that Mr Trump spouts so casually, simply because he can.
The Ukraine war, and Mr Trump’s habit of making excuses for Vladimir Putin, is a more serious case of undermining the rights of people to decide their own future – although, thankfully, the humiliation for America of a total sellout of the Ukrainian people seems to have acted, for once, as a brake on the president’s worst instincts.
It is in his conduct of the war with Iran, however, that Mr Trump has departed most dramatically not just from past American policy, but from present American interests and even his own previous opposition to “forever wars”.
Having launched, with Israeli forces, what was supposed to be a surgical strike on the Iranian leadership at the end of February, Mr Trump is now, six months later, intensifying the war against a regime that was supposed to have been toppled.
There is no end in sight – and no end in sight to the economic damage to the world, including America, caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which the US president has casually suggested be renamed as the “Strait of Trump”.
Mr Trump was told that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was hoping to engage him in this doomed enterprise in order to save his political skin in Israel. All his advisers said that the Iranian people would be unable to rise up against their oppressive theocracy just because some of its leading personnel had been killed. All of them except Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, whose credibility with anyone who understands the issues is minimal.
Andy Burnham, the new British prime minister, is expected to meet Mr Trump for the first time later this month, around the time of the United Nations general assembly starting on 22 September. The temptation might be for Mr Burnham to be more like Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, who has rallied Canadian opinion by taking a robustly oppositional stance, than like Sir Keir Starmer, who tried to manage the monstrous ego.
But Sir Keir’s approach was in the British national interest – and, for a while, it succeeded in protecting us from the worst of Mr Trump’s capricious tariffs.
Mr Burnham must recognise that, while the president may be unpredictable and many of his actions ruinous for America and the world, it remains in the British national interest to maintain good relations with America for the long term.
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