In weeks like this, the mask slips somewhat. Politicians love the illusion of control. It’s the special power that differentiates them from us lower orders. They are the ones pulling all the levers. Nothing ever happens that takes them unawares. They are the ones with answers to everything. They need it to be this way. Not just for their own psyches but for ours. It’s somehow comforting.
And then along comes Donald Trump and our emperors have no clothes. Their limitations on view to everyone. Scrabbling around just to stand still. Trying to make sense of the world in real time, just like the rest of us. Making it up as they go along.
To be fair, there is no shame in this. Their real crime is to pretend they know what they are doing the rest of the time. Let’s face it: The Donald doesn’t know what The Donald is going to do or say from one day to the next, so it’s hardly likely that anyone else will. He isn’t even sure if Greenland is Iceland. Hell, they’ve both got land in them. Watch out, England. The only certainty is uncertainty, much as politicians wish it were otherwise.
It’s been quite the few days. At the weekend the US president was threatening the UK and seven other European countries with tariffs for sending troops to Greenland, a few days after he had demanded Nato countries send troops to Greenland. Go figure. There may be a mind somewhere in Trump’s brain but it’s been scrambled. The synapses haven’t met in years. There’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Then The Donald threatened a military invasion and started posting mock-ups of Greenland and Canada as US states, while trash-talking his Nato allies. In a hard-to-follow, borderline psychotic speech at Davos, he then said he wouldn’t take Greenland by force but he still wanted to buy it and he wouldn’t forget who had tried to stop him.
Then, just as world leaders were trying to catch their breath and work out all the angles, late on Wednesday he popped up on social media to say he had had a meeting with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, and everything was now cool. He didn’t want to annex Greenland after all, as they had come to a deal. Probably the very best deal in the whole history of deals. Certainly the best deal since the last deal that Trump has done. Better even than ending the eight wars that he hasn’t ended.
Cue much surprise and chaos as politicians tried to make sense of a global order that was being rewritten in real time. Everyone eager to get the best hot take. Some, mostly American, claimed it as a triumph for Trump. The Art of the Deal made flesh. Go in hard, disrupt and sucker your opponents into giving you what you had always wanted. Others called it classic Taco. Trump Always Chickens Out. The president had gone to the brink and then blinked when he couldn’t get his own way.
Come Thursday morning in the UK, it was the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, who was sent out on the media round to explain it all from the government’s insider position. On the Today programme, Amol Rajan got straight to the point. What had been agreed? There was a long pause. Far longer than the two-second delay on communications from Davos. Er … it had been the result of determined diplomacy. An unwavering adherence to the highest principles. Nato working at its best.
Rajan sounded understandably confused. Please remind our listeners, he said: what exactly was the deal again? Again a lengthy pause. Determined diplomacy. An unwavering adherence to the highest principles. Nato working at its best. At which point, the penny dropped. Yvette didn’t have any more idea what the deal was than the rest of us. She was completely in the dark.
It could be anything or nothing. Rutte might just have reminded the president that under a 1951 treaty he was already entitled to have US sovereign bases on Greenland along with some mineral rights. Marco Rubio might have persuaded Trump to back down after falls in the stock market. Or Trump might just have got bored with Greenland. He had concentrated on it for nearly five days, which was already way beyond his mental capacity. He was on to the next thing. Hey, Greenland was no place for a summer vacation.
Then Cooper hit her groove. She could put her own spin on the vacuum of knowledge. We shouldn’t worry too much about what the deal was. After all, in Trumpworld any deal could be ripped up in days. I mean, having a vague outline of a deal was, on balance, better than not having a vague outline of a deal. But let’s keep things in the day. Or hour.
What we really needed to understand was that, if there was a vague deal, it was all down to Keir Starmer. It had been Keir’s steadfast support for the sovereignty of Greenland that had shifted the dial. Brilliant. Because there wasn’t anyone around who would contradict that. In a world of relative truths, where there are any number of realities, there was a parallel universe in which Keir was the ultimate Trump whisperer. And no, we weren’t about to be dragged in to The Donald’s latest distraction. Have you seen some of the undesirables on the “board of peace”? she asked Sky News. We did have principles. Good to know.
Over in Davos, there was one other UK politician giving his reaction to the Greenland deal or no deal. Step forward Nigel Farage, who was giving an interview to Bloomberg first thing in the morning. Nige knew even less than most, though that wasn’t going to stop him pretending he did. “Mark Carney has been wrong about everything,” he said.
That’s odd, replied the interviewer, Stephanie Flanders. Because everyone else reckons the Canadian prime minister has played a blinder. Telling it as it is. That as long as Trump is in the White House we can no longer count on international law and a united Nato. Nige shrugged. What the past week had shown was a fragmentation into national interests. Weird. Most of us had seen a more or less united Europe. Almost as if the Reform leader was enjoying being wilfully wrong. There again, the only contributions Farage has admitted enjoying at Davos over the years were those of Trump and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. So he was in good company.
The Bonfire of the Insanities by John Crace (Guardian Faber Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
