You’ll have seen this – everyone must have done by now. It even featured on tonight’s Swedish TV News. They called it ‘bisarra’.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114068387897265338
We don’t yet know its genesis. It appeared on Trump’s website. Did he order it? Or approve it? I think we need to know. It gives a disturbing glimpse into his narrow property-tycoon’s mind.
Bearded belly-dancers? A giant golden statue of the Donald? Elon stuffing food into his mouth? Souvenirs of a little Trump sitting on a golden toilet? A crotch-eyed view of him and Netanyahu lying half-naked on a beach? – ‘Bizarre’ doesn’t cover it.
If he did authorise this, the very least it shows is that he has no sense of humour, or awareness of satire; a fatal flaw in any human being. (Thatcher had it too.)
Porter’s Pensées 
Joachim Fest wrestled with the “great man” theory of history:
“No one else produced, in a solitary course lasting only a few years, such incredible accelerations in the pace of history… The period of his entry into politics was dominated by the liberal bourgeois system. But he grasped the latent oppositions to it and by bold and wayward combinations seized upon those factors and incorporated them into his program… those institutions that had recently seemed to be permanent and unchallenged were on their way out: democracy and political-party government, unions, international workers’ solidarity, the European system of alliances…In this ability to uncover the deeper spirit and tendencies of the age, and to represent those tendencies, there certainly is an element of historic greatness. “It appears to be the destiny of greatness,” Jacob Burckhardt wrote…”that it executes a will going beyond individual desires”… And yet we hesitate to call [him] great…An ancient tenet of aesthetics holds that one who for all his remarkable traits is a repulsive human being, is unfit to be a hero… His many opaque, instinctual traits, his intolerance and vindictiveness, his lack of generosity, his banal and naked materialism – power was the only motive he would recognize, and he repeatedly forced his table companions to join in his scorn for anything else as “bosh” – and in general his unmistakably vulgar characteristics give his image a cast of repugnant ordinariness that simply will not square with the traditional concept of greatness.”
I wonder who is being described.
By contrast – though not necessarily in contradiction – Stephen Wertheim suggests that framing the present crisis in the wrong terms could prove self-fulfilling:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/03/europe-trump-ukraine
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