Trying to pin down the real Donald Trump is a mug’s game. Doubtless, some will have persuaded themselves that the real Trump was the one we saw in Windsor a week ago, fawning over the royals, treating Keir Starmer with respect, and claiming that Britain and the United States were two notes in the same chord. Well, maybe.
Perhaps the more plausible version was actually the one who went to the United Nations this week. This Trump went not to fawn but to boast and trash, whingeing about everything from the UN’s supposed failure to back his claims to have ended seven “un-endable” wars, to its refusal to award him a renovation building contract – “I said at the time that I would do it for $500m, rebuilding everything, it would be beautiful” – for its New York headquarters complex.
Which one is the real Trump? There is probably no single version of the US president’s huge personality that makes complete sense of all the competing others. To be fair, Trump is not alone in this. Centuries ago, Michel de Montaigne wrote that none of us is ever one person alone; “every sort of contradiction can be found in me,” the French sage concluded. Never a truer word was written, especially as far as Trump is concerned.
Another clue that may help unlock the puzzle is that Trump’s explosive mix of often contradictory qualities seems increasingly to resemble that of Otto von Bismarck. The founder of modern Germany is many people’s idea of a master politician – not something that many – except maybe Trump himself – would say about the president yet.
Like Trump, however, Bismarck had the ability both to charm and brutalise, to calculate and to rage, to dominate the room, to never forgive his critics – and to lie shamelessly in pursuit of his goals. Bismarck was far more consequential in his career than Trump has yet been in his, but there are some disturbing parallels already, not least in the fateful instability of what Bismarck eventually left behind.
It would be a mistake to read too much too soon into Trump’s unexpected comments about Ukraine on Tuesday. What he said was, all the same, a very striking U-turn for a man who thought his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin could unlock a peace deal. Now, he has switched to backing the shooting down of Russian planes violating European airspace; dismissing Russia as a paper tiger not a real military power; and claiming that Ukraine could win back all of its lost territory since 2022. “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump posted later.
Trump also promised “to supply weapons to Nato for Nato to do what they want with them”. That would also be very big, if true; the issue has bedevilled Nato’s negotiations with Washington for months. If Volodymyr Zelenskyy is also right that Trump is offering US postwar military guarantees to Ukraine, then this looks like something more substantial than mere hardening of the president’s language against Russia.
There is a case for asking whether the UN speech may have been something of a smokescreen, designed mainly for an isolationist US domestic audience. Meanwhile, off-camera, some potentially significant stuff was actually going on nearby over Gaza and Ukraine. Trump’s New York meetings with Zelenskyy and with Arab and Muslim world leaders suggest as much.
Yet it would be foolish to dismiss the UN speech as a mere diversionary exercise or tactical ploy. It was more substantive and significant than that. Yes, there were the familiar lies and false claims on everything from the un-endable wars, through Sadiq Khan’s wish to introduce sharia law to London, to Trump’s own poll numbers. “The highest … I’ve ever had,” he asserted; in fact, his approval ratings are at a second-term low.
And, yes, the narcissism and the language were at times outrageous. “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he told nations that are supposedly still the US’s loyal allies – before denouncing “the green energy scam” and adding: “Trump was right about everything, and I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.” At 57 minutes, not the expected 15, it was a hard speech to listen to.
Yet there was content in it too. There was also a clear argument. The White House had billed the speech as an exposition of how US power would be deployed on the world stage. The first part of the answer was predictable: not through the United Nations. So, as the tariff wars have shown, was the second: its power would be exercised unilaterally by a sovereign independent US. As the White House news release succinctly put it: “At UN, President Trump champions sovereignty, rejects globalism.”
Trump asked at one stage what the UN’s purpose was. His real quarrel, though, is with the international rules-based order itself, of which the UN forms merely one part. This stretches beyond the wider postwar settlement that the US shaped in the 1940s. In fact, as the speech made increasingly clear, Trump is more opposed to recent global regulatory accords and international law than he is to the post-1945 institutions that the US can dominate. This is why he hates the climate accords, and why he will always dislike the EU. It is also why he wants to export his ideas to Europe and Britain, and thus weaken the rules-based order’s principal champions.
For Trump, the speech’s key issues are to end the threat to sovereign nations, as he sees it, from migration and the green agenda. These are not passing fancies. They are his enduring priorities, and they will remain so. This is likely to have continuing repercussions in the domestic politics of Europe, and perhaps, because the two countries insist so much on their special relationship, in British politics most of all. In the end, that’s why this speech matters.
Nothing else can explain why Trump used the UN speech to attack Britain so insistently. Britain got it in the neck more than China, than Russia, than Venezuela or than North Korea. Trump attacked Britain relentlessly, sometimes seemingly more in sorrow than in anger, over migration, over international law, renewable energy, North Sea oil and on the recognition of Palestine. Less than a week after Trump’s state visit, the transatlantic chord sounds more dissonant now. It was as if Trump has looked at the world and at last found an unexpected adversary – us.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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