It is pointless to ask, as Macdara did recently, whether the squabble between Zelenskyy and the inhabitants of the grotesque underworld that is the Oval Office, were staging their recent confrontation. Such a question is the mark, your correspondent admits, of an old-fashioned mind. It is not that Trump necessitated that Zelenskyy engage in reality television antics before the world, not in the sense that a script was agreed in outline before they sat down. No, Trump is a man of television; it is his habitat, and he has a way of turning everything around him into tacky reality television. If Zelenskyy was drawn into the melodrama, it must be hard to avoid, especially for a frustrated head of state of a country that has been invaded. 

Everything Trump touches turns into television. Everything he says turns into television. A media starving for content will find unending content in this man: this is why they hyped him all the way to the presidency, twice. Trump was heard to remark that the confrontation will make great television. How—in a Late Capitalist environment—can Trump be confronted, when any confrontation gives him attention, the thing he needs to grow in size? He will grow and grow until he fills the entire available space, that is clear. Surely the question is rather of what will happen afterwards.

Meanwhile, although the present writer’s attention was so much focused on the world at large that he did recognise the name Keir Starmer but for a minute could not quite place who the person so named might be, the English Prime Minister staged an embarrassing display of obsequiousness for Trump. One feels that flattery might not be the inexhaustible currency that Starmer clearly hopes it will be. It says something about his horrific performance in his role so far, and about English media and politics more broadly, that the only thing he has done that could remotely be described as a success is his sucking up to Trump. For one leader of the multi-branch English Establishment Party, the visit showed England back leading on the world stage. In fact Trump has charmed the English, not the other way around, as they will realise sooner or later.

Smarmer has imitated his host by cutting aid, showing that his astonishing personal greed is matched by an immense cruelty that we must, after all, always expect of an English politician. Sitting there like the lollipop-lady-in-chief that he is, he was proud to be one of the leaders unaccountably running to attend upon Trump. Did they all really need to arrive one after the other, day by day, like that? Of course not. But power has its own logic, so they could not have questioned their impulse to be there as Trump holds court, looking not just bored and confused by his guests but disgusted at them.

It is insanity in itself that the European countries have let themselves be so dependent upon Americans, showing a real laziness and lack of imagination for what might transpire in the irrational settler colonial enterprise that is the USA. Though as hostile to the Security Apparatus as anyone might expect, Macdara cannot understand why the capitalist regimes, dedicated to violence as they are, would incapacitate themselves in the way they have done. Watching the Europeans react to the breakup has been a bizarre sight: a load of second-order bullies realising that the head of the gang has crossed to the other side of the schoolyard. But whatever measures are taken to protect European Security, it will be the peoples of the majority world who will suffer.