Trump’s Court Historian Is a Caddie: More Powerful Than Attila, and Peace Can Wait

On the overnight flight back from France, barely after signing the Iran agreement in Versailles, the eighty year old president sent nearly twenty messages in six hours, about golf balls and gilded statues, a ballroom and Attila the Hun. Sleep was not among them.

A man of eighty, known for falling asleep in public, boarded Air Force One in France shortly before two in the morning to fly home. He could have used the hours over the Atlantic to sleep. He used them to post. Nearly twenty messages over more than six hours, published on his own platform Truth Social, by a man who had just signed in Versailles the agreement meant to end the war with Iran, that fourteen point memorandum with three hundred billion dollars for the reconstruction of Iran and the promise to lift all sanctions on Tehran, condemned across party lines as a bad deal. One imagines a tired man resting. He did not.

He began by praising himself, sharing a segment from Jesse Watters’ Fox program claiming that he was taking a victory lap in Paris after securing peace. But then, instead of criticism from the left and the right, came the golf ball. The president praised a decision preventing limits on golf ball distance in professional play, an old dispute between the R&A and the United States Golf Association. Golf is hotter than a pistol, he wrote, and the last thing anyone should do is tell people for absolutely no reason that they can no longer hit the ball as far as before. Had anyone ever heard of something so ridiculous. Peace ranked below the golf ball.

What followed was the sort of thing a sleepless night produces. More clips from Sean Hannity’s program, endorsements of Republican lawmakers and Colombian presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, along with details of his SAVE America Act, intended to remake the electoral system. He also passed along a forty nine point list from conservative author Michael Savage imagining what would have happened had Kamala Harris won in 2024, including a mandatory hijab day and the shutdown of X, while accusing its owner Elon Musk of rigging elections for the Russians.

But another post marked the peak. The president shared the words of a certain Dave King, who considered him more dangerous than Hitler and Attila the Hun, even more than Genghis Khan, because his reach was greater. He shared it as praise. A man who takes being ranked above Attila as a compliment says more about himself than any opponent ever could.

The true high point of the night, however, deserves a closer look. The president shared an essay introduced with the words Presidential Historian Dave King, sounds good to me, and that essay attempted nothing less than to crown him the most powerful man ever to walk the planet. Alexander, the Caesars, Genghis Khan and Attila, Tamerlane and Napoleon, even Hitler, Mao, and Stalin were dismissed as little more than provincial figures, butchers of small villages, terrorists more in the style of the Taliban than men of real power, lacking only the global reach the president supposedly commands. William the Conqueror, who conquered only a single country and did not even make it to Scotland or Ireland, was portrayed as a sparrow where the president was the American eagle. One might dismiss it as ordinary flattery if not for the small detail that surpasses satire itself. This presidential historian is, according to reporting, neither the well known historian David King nor any recognized scholar of presidents at all, but a wealthy businessman from South Africa, a longtime associate and former caddie of golfer Gary Player. And so the circle of a single night closes. The man who watches over golf balls as statesmen watch over borders receives his world history from the man who once carried a golfer’s clubs. Anyone willing to place himself above Attila should at least pay attention to who is doing the measuring. The eagle, it turns out, is being measured by a caddie.

The night continued. A two hundred twenty six word celebration of American led technology. Then he promoted a book by Fox personality Tyrus and shared praise supposedly coming from a released American hostage. Then he defended his favorite project, the White House ballroom, which he said was turning out magnificently, on schedule and under budget, word for word the same message he had already posted on June 4, including praise for the DronePort, which he described as indispensable to national security.

Where such a night was heading became visible at the end. It closed in gold. The president shared images of Valor, the statue at Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington, which had supposedly been almost completely regilded by his great Department of the Interior. Only when the aircraft touched down at Joint Base Andrews at 3:21 a.m. Eastern Time did he fall silent. Back at the White House, around four thirty, he picked up the thread again. It is not the first time. One analysis found only five days in April on which he might have slept through an entire night.

That is what the sleep of power looks like. The man whose eyes close during the day cannot close them at night because he must be seen. He must gild and repost whatever praises him. Gold is the tool of someone who does not want something examined too closely, and perhaps that explains the entire night. A statue is regilded and a treaty wrapped in gold, by a vanity that cannot rest. Peace can wait and the golf ball can too. But the thing that seems to wait the longest of all is sleep.