{"id":420131,"date":"2026-01-21T04:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T04:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/420131\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T04:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T04:50:11","slug":"rambling-trump-runs-through-his-achievements-as-worried-world-watches-on-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/420131\/","title":{"rendered":"Rambling Trump runs through his achievements as worried world watches on | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was quite the baseball player, you wouldn\u2019t believe,\u201d said Donald Trump<\/a>, suddenly wistful as he recalled his salad days when his mother would tell him, \u201cSon, you could be a professional baseball player,\u201d and he would reply, \u201cThanks, mom.\u201d Carpe diem!<\/p>\n

Not for the first time on Tuesday, the US president had veered wildly off topic. The point of this story was a \u201cbig building\u201d that \u201cloomed over the park\u201d in Queens, New York, where he used to play little league baseball. When he asked why it had bars on the windows, she told him it was a mental hospital.<\/p>\n

Trump, 79, a self-proclaimed \u201cvery stable genius<\/a>\u201d who keeps \u201cacing\u201d cognitive tests, made so many references to the \u201cmentally insane\u201d and \u201cinsane asylums\u201d in the White House briefing room that it seemed like insecurity. It also gave cold comfort to a watching world that fears the future of the transatlantic alliance now lies in the hands of a modern Caligula.<\/p>\n

Over more than an hour and a half, Trump marked his first year in office by reading a list of his accomplishments in a slow monotone as if deliberately torturing his old adversary, the media, who were crammed elbow to elbow. The list became as repetitive \u2013 and chilling \u2013 as Jack Torrance typing<\/a> \u201cAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,\u201d over and over in The Shining.<\/p>\n

Trump threw in some wild zigzags, from \u201cI love Hispanic\u201d to naked xenophobia about Somalia, from the big lie that he won the 2020 election to a dismissal of former special counsel Jack Smith as \u201ca sick son of a bitch<\/a>\u201d, from rebranding coal as \u201cclean, beautiful coal\u201d to renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the \u201cGulf of Trump\u201d (the last one was a joke, he promised).<\/p>\n

Along the way there was a surprise when he called ICE\u2019s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis \u201ca tragedy\u201d and \u201ca horrible thing\u201d<\/a>, although perhaps not so surprising when he added that he recently learned that Good\u2019s parents were \u201ctremendous Trump fans\u201d.<\/p>\n

And as the president brandished a giant file \u2013 no, not Epstein \u2013 there was an unexpected battle with a paper clip. \u201cWhoo!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cI\u2019m glad my finger wasn\u2019t in that sucker. That could\u2019ve dome some damage, but you know what? I wouldn\u2019t have shown the pain. I would\u2019ve gone back. Boy, did you hear that? That was nasty. But I would not have shown the pain. I would\u2019ve acted like nothing happened as my finger fell off.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much for the stable genius. To sit in the crowded briefing room was like being on a bus full of commuters who realise the driver has yanked out the brakes and is laughing as they plunge downhill.<\/p>\n

The humourist Tom Lehrer<\/a> once observed: \u201cPolitical satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.\u201d It made a comeback when Donald Trump was offered the Nobel peace prize by the actual winner, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado of Venezuela, and grabbed it like an eager schoolboy.<\/p>\n

But he is still sore with Norway, a country he used to admire for sending \u2013 unlike Somalia \u2013 the right kind of immigrants. In a weekend message to Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr St\u00f8re, Trump said he no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnded eight unendable wars in 10 months,\u201d he insisted on Tuesday. \u201cI should have gotten the Nobel prize for each war, but I don\u2019t say that. I save millions and millions of people. And don\u2019t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn\u2019t control the shots, OK? It\u2019s in Norway. Norway control the shots. It\u2019s a joke. They lost such prestige.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone in Europe is asking: how could America elect the Joker and can the fate of global security really depend on the bruised ego of one man? Again, the commander-in-chief offered precious little by way of reassurance about his neocolonial ambitions. One reporter asked: \u201cHow far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?\u201d The president replied<\/a>: \u201cYou\u2019ll find out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another wondered if the break-up of the Nato alliance was a price worth paying for Greenland. Trump insisted: \u201cSomething is going to happen which will be very good for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good for Vladimir Putin<\/a>, perhaps, whose dreams of driving a wedge between Nato allies are finally coming true.<\/p>\n

At his inauguration, Trump had stood in the US Capitol rotunda proclaiming a new golden age of America as tech overlords looked on. One year on, he kept repeating himself in a soporific, almost slurring voice in the kind of discombobulated performance that would have had Republicans demanding that Joe Biden be yanked from office under the 25th amendment and committed to a mental institution.<\/p>\n

Will anyone in Washington stand up and pull the emergency brake before it\u2019s too late?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI was quite the baseball player, you wouldn\u2019t believe,\u201d said Donald Trump, suddenly wistful as he recalled his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-420131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}