A lot of people are asking this now. It could be grounds for his removal from office. Personally, I can see a certain perverse logic in his statements and actions up to now, and even a fairly sane explanation for them in ‘late-stage capitalist’ terms. But his war against Iran hardly seems consistent with this, looking as it does like being a disaster in so many ways, even if he ‘wins’ it, or can present it as a win; and accompanied as it is by a rhetoric which is certainly undiplomatic, and appears extreme, wild and possibly counter-productive. ‘Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP’. A little later he warned that Iran’s millennia-old ‘civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again’ unless Tehran capitulates. It would be bombed ‘back to the stone age’.

I don’t imagine that Trump has the slightest appreciation of the glorious achievements of the Persians in pre-Roman times, never – by all accounts – having read a book, even his own; but he probably wouldn’t be deterred by that in any event. He’s the very embodiment of a xenophobic idiot, self-obsessed, possessed by irrational hatreds, and probably insecure personally; who under any other political system, and in almost any other age, would have been kept safely away from high political office. Americans will have their work cut out to further amend their much admired Constitution – whose separation of powers was supposed to prevent this kind of thing – in order to ensure that someone like Trump can’t rise to the top again.

Whether this makes him ‘mad’ is a question for the medical and psychological experts. But ‘unbalanced’, certainly.

We have about four hours to go before we know whether he has indeed blown Iran back to prehistoric times. It’s 10.30 p.m. now in Sweden (4.30 p.m. in Washington DC). I won’t be waiting up.