30 August 2025
As another August fades into history, the world is still divided between people who think Donald Trump is off his rocker and those who never thought he was on it in the first place.
Trump’s recent achievements include announcing that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could end the war with Russia “almost immediately” if he wanted to. Of course he could: all he has to do is agree with everything Vladimir Putin wants and the war will end as Russia secures its new borders and disenfranchises all Ukrainians.
At Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, he was obviously confident when he welcomed Putin at the airport. After the meeting, it was all too obvious that Trump hadn’t got his own way and his vanity had been punctured: he sat slumped in his chair while Putin sat upright and inscrutable.
He also proved that surrounding oneself with unqualified sycophants is never the best idea when it was widely reported that one of his team had left confidential documents describing his brief for the meeting in a public area of an Alaskan hotel.
Billy Long, a loyal Trump supporting Republican congressman and previously an auctioneer, was appointed head of the Internal Revenue Service in June and has just been booted out. His appointment at the time had raised eyebrows because Long’s previous experience of tax were limited to the promotion of a fraud-riddled tax credit scheme. The next head of the IRS will be Trump’s 7th appointment so far this year.
His stunning lack of self-knowledge (and ‘political’ nous) was revealed when the Norwegian media Dagens Næringsliv reported that he had cold-called the Norwegian finance minister Jens Stoltenberg to ask for a Nobel Peace Prize.
When one remembers that Henry Kissinger was awarded a peace price in 1973, this perhaps isn’t so unlikely after all. Kissinger was awarded the prize together with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho but Tho had the decency to reject it and was reported by the New York Times as saying “peace has not yet really been established in South”.
A ceasefire had been agreed in October 1972 but Kissinger then ordered a bombing raid on Hanoi in December and two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest at the award while a New York Times op-ed suggested it should be called the ‘Nobel War Prize’.
North and South Vietnam remained at war until North Vietnam took Saigon in April 1975 and united the country.
Nothing much has changed in the Middle East except that Benjamin Netanyahu (another rocker-free ‘leader’) has decided the best way to improve Israel’s image internationally is to target and murder the journalists reporting on what they do, even if they’re inside a hospital. They’ve even added a subtlety of their own by killing a bunch of journalists and then hitting exactly the same target again 15 minutes after the first attack so the aid workers and surviving journalists who had arrived to help the wounded are also killed.
Despite tens of thousands of people, Jews and Arabs, joining demonstrations across the country calling on Netanyahu to cancel plans to attack Gaza City, Israel’s military is accelerating its preparations for the assault.
Critics, including relatives of hostages still in Gaza, say he is prolonging the war to extend his personal political career and further delay the courts hearing the criminal charges brought against him.
Even Trump said “I’m not happy about it”.
Numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate that, by May this year, almost 9,000 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were dead or “probably dead”. However, Israel believed they had already killed some 53,000 Palestinians, thereby admitting that almost five out of six people they’d killed were civilians.
Earlier in August, the Israel Defense Force had even “claimed responsibility” for the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and admitted having targeted him.
(Have you noticed that bombers and other terrorists are always reported as “claiming responsibility” for such atrocities. I once suggested to Jon Snow, then a Channel 4 News presenter, that they should say that bombers had “accepted the blame” for atrocities but he was surprisingly defensive and said that a lot of editorial thought had been given to the words used.)
All that Britain can offer is Nigel Farage who has taken advantage of other politicians taking holidays to produce headline-grabbing soundbites – lots of emotional fluff not too hampered by detail or facts. (One journalist, possibly not a fan, pointed out that Farage grabbed headlines during the summer recess because he took his own holidays while parliament was sitting.)
His “Operation Restoring Justice” (no, me neither) proposes the deportation of “absolutely anyone” arriving in a small boat and the removal of the UK’s commitments to human rights. He said he would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, disapply the 1951 refugee convention and the UN convention against torture as well as the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking convention. (His party has already promised to do away with all those rubbish policies on equality and diversity.)
The whole thing is so ludicrous I wonder if Farage would claim he’s just patriotic but I wonder when patriotism merges with racism and ill-considered beliefs in ‘racial purity’ (c.f. Hitler’s Germanic “Master Race”, which was to be achieved by murdering Jews, Russians, Roma, disabled people, and anybody who wasn’t tall and blonde – and that was just the women because Hitler himself was short and dark).
It reminds me of whoever it was who claimed they could prove that everybody was still anti-semitic.
“Nonsense” said a friend, “I’m not anti-anybody.”
“Well, just think: Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews.”
“That was 90 years ago.”
“But, in Germany today, there are still Nazi groups whose aim is to kill another 6 million Jews and 47 postmen.”
“47 postmen???”
“You see, not even you care about the Jews.”
Lesser Mutterings 