The Loneliest Guy in the Room

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Donald Trump seemed like a spent force. For 60 minutes, he rambled in murmuring self-pity that sounded straight out of an iron lung, looking every bit the sort of man who can break the law to try to punish a TV comedian and lose anyway.

They don’t let just anybody play the main room at Turtle Bay; we’re talking the real greats like Benjamin Netanyahu and Idi Amin. Trump didn’t echo Big Dada’s famous denunciation of Zionism, but give the Big Man time to settle into his final term. Instead, he sold himself and the All New 2025 America Extended Cab to a group of people with no allegiance to him, American media or American myth. He scolded and condemned the failing rest of the world via a litany of tubercularly incanted immigration lies and memes long since corroded into Republican lore, which only make near-sense to a domestic crowd used to hearing them, the way your brain forces a pattern on a foreign-language hit song after enough repetition. 

You can watch the speech for yourself. Trump gripped the podium for dear life, leaned toward the teleprompter like a dog sticking its head out the car window and began his customary arrhythmic delivery of reading something aloud he’d never seen before. He praised the multitude of nations and cultures in attendance, which no one suspects he’s aware of (sad!), let alone has a good thing to say about (not very exclusive). He praised himself for things he hasn’t done (seven wars — ended!) and for reversing evils that were not committed by his enemies. He told the representatives of the listening nations that they were killing their own countries in ways that reminded him of things that didn’t actually happen in the United States or anywhere outside his mind palace. 

There was also this thought, which sounds like it emerged from a brain in a Cuisinart on pulse mode. “But you know,” said Trump,

we have a border, strong and we have a shape. And that shape doesn’t just go straight up. That shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere. And if we had the most-clean air — and I think we do. We have very clean air. We have the cleanest air we’ve had in many, many years. But the problem is that other countries like China, which has air that’s a little bit rough — it blows. And no matter what you’re doing down here, the air up here tends to get very dirty because it comes in from other countries, where their air isn’t so clean. And the environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that. Same thing with garbage. In Asia, they dump much of their garbage right into the ocean. And over about a one-week and two-week journey, it flows right past Los Angeles. You’ve seen it. Massive amounts of garbage, almost too much to do anything about, flowing past Los Angeles, past San Francisco. And then somebody would get in trouble because he dropped a cigarette on the beach.”

If you had a medical degree and encountered someone speaking like this before taking out their keys and unlocking a car, you would have an affirmative duty to intervene. Instead, everyone waited until he finished holding space for expressing how unloved he feels. That’s the trick, though. After the praise and the threats, there’s nothing but the loneliness.

To paraphrase Clausewitz or Kennan, loneliness isn’t great for countries, security-wise. The postwar international order that Trump has ended was based, at its best, on the idea that countries united by mutually beneficial trade and security arrangements tend to hurt each other less, project a greater sense of security to their enemies and offer those enemies incentives to cooperate, if not become friends. This order was reified through membership in representative bodies and tedious but dignity-aspirational ceremonies with a lot of handshaking and delicate affirmations. As with public spaces like bars and at ballgames, part of mutual security is simple politeness. But Donald Trump has enough insecurity to project onto an entire planet, so we find ourselves watching him insult the Muslim mayor of London and castigate a China that’s leading the world in renewables over its carbon emissions while begging every other country on Earth to “drill, baby, drill.”

Like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Barry Bonds’ 2004 OPS, the Big Man puts up preposterous numbers that will never be broken, like a roughly $30 billion monthly tax increase on all Americans via tariff, which he is certain will be paid by other countries. Part of this is just farming for kickbacks, but Trump seems to genuinely believe that, left to rot in their own filth, 7.8 billion people will fling themselves on the table and grant whatever trade imbalances we want, at the nice price. He is walking the plank, turning around and threatening to “saw the boat off,” chuckling as the current takes him away that those losers will be back any second now. 

He lectured the world about life and the lives of children after rescinding funds already budgeted to agencies whose absence will lead to millions of deaths over the next decade. He stopped the U.S. from meeting its obligations to funding the same U.N. building he complained about, incorrectly, after his own staff bungled Public Appearance 101. The right-wing propaganda wires drowned out the clown music with shrieking horror at the fact that the U.N. placed him in the path of an assassin’s bullet by putting him on the wild breakneck trajectory of an escalator that stopped. 

Trump is the way he is because he cannot be anything else. And because he and the Republican Party are remaking the nation in his image, it shall ever be thus for the rest of us. Before an unbiased audience, the intellectual and behavioral degradation of the one is reflected on the other. Maintaining what’s left of America’s reputation as an economic and security partner is now a game of alternating between the carrot of nauseating flattery and the stick of thuggish intimidation. With the exception of “more lies,” it has no plan for when neither work. 

Even if Trump’s thoroughly delusional theory of tariffs functioned with the protection-racket reliability he claimed, no company needs to make significant investments in a future here, where numbers have less shelf life than Liz Truss. Why risk commitments to a nation gutting the human infrastructure undergirding its national agricultural and construction industries while also terrorizing lawful foreign workers building manufacturing infrastructure and already planning to leave? Laws and economic policies are only a coin flip or a necessary exculpation away from vanishing or reversing, as are the rights of citizens and businesses. This is a demented country, an increasingly selectively amnesiac country, that has good days and bad days, whose only reliable motivation is Donald Trump’s enrichment and perpetual immunity from prison for it. 

Having a conversation with Donald Trump or America on anything other than Donald Trump is like trying to reason with Disney’s Hall of Presidents after pouring Big Gulps in the machines. You cannot plan with America, and you cannot compromise. You can’t even talk with it, because today and tomorrow and the next day it will only ever be having the same conversation: Whatever a sundowning and already world-historically stupid fascist said to evade accountability for whatever recent crime he was asked about, and then the only channel he watches replying by feeding his fantastical narcissism back to him and reassuring him that anyone denying the new reality is lying, crooked and a terrorist. There is no engaging with that degrading dialogue loop. There is no generational diplomacy, no network of shared burdens and incentives, no macroeconomic tomorrow. The facts on the ground now are like the results on the pop quiz in “The Simpsons” episode where Bart became an all-powerful telepath: They have been changed to accord with his answers on the test. There are no binding political charters or fundamental economic truths. Our country is now called “Bonerland,” and it was founded by “Some Guy.” You can comply with it or you can ignore it, and you guess which choice gained more ground with the U.N. audience as the speech wheezed toward its terminus.

If international diplomacy and national status are a birthday party that requires inviting every co-worker, Trump made America into the most malignant and increasingly inessential asshole on the job, the guy who threatens not to show up if you keep ignoring him. Part of power is little more than the perception that you have it, and an increasingly nihilistic and aimlessly violent United States had long been cruising a lot more on style than on results. Then Donald Trump’s bottomless thirst for obedience and praise worked its magic on a world that can read its own press. When no one questioned it, when everyone anted up the same as always, he loudly called America’s bluff, on everything, all at once. He will continue having the same tantrum at the results and finding sympathy only with people who look like they were cast as a Mussolini knockoff in a TNT Original Movie. 

Eventually, he will threaten more simultaneous wars than there are sides on RPG dice, more than any alliance could ever sustain, without the prestige or coercive power of a functioning international order to make the threat remotely credible. Our five-tool failure of a president continues to put up Hall of Fame numbers in how not to succeed. We will never see this much dumbass in a single person again.