When the Emperor Has No Clothes, But Three Press Conferences a Day - And Venezuela Is Supposed to Become the 51st U.S. State

There are days when you begin wondering whether you are still reading a newspaper or already staring at the script of a canceled satire show nobody wanted to produce anymore because it felt too unbelievable. Today was one of those days again. Donald Trump spoke, and when Donald Trump speaks, he does not speak so much as erupt. Like a broken kettle exploding in a kitchen where nobody can find the emergency shutoff anymore.

Inside the Oval Office, there was supposed to be an event about maternal health. Women were there, actual women with actual problems who wanted to discuss real gaps in the American healthcare system. Trump listened with approximately the same attention span a toddler gives a sermon before adding that they should please “not go on too long” because a “big group of generals” was waiting to discuss Iran with him. Maternal health versus bombs. That is what a list of priorities looks like in Trump’s world. The women were still allowed to breathe. Not much more than that.

Then came the next chapter. Trump tells Fox News he is “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state.” His reasoning, apparently sufficient even to himself: “Venezuela loves Trump.” You have to read that sentence twice to fully understand he did not mean it ironically. A country he was sanctioning, isolating and insulting until recently is now supposedly going to be annexed because it allegedly loves him. By the same logic, he could also marry Greenland or adopt Canada. What is being sold as foreign policy doctrine is in reality the daily output of a man who confuses the world map with a kindergarten lunch menu.

Then it continues. The Kurds. The same Kurds who died fighting ISIS while the United States flew drones from air-conditioned containers. Trump literally says the Kurds “take, take, take.” They supposedly have a good reputation in Congress because lawmakers say, “oh, they fight so hard.” Then came the sentence that honestly belongs pinned to the wall of every history department on earth: “They fight hard when they get paid.” That coming from the man who demands a different payment for his own loyalty every single day. Erdogan in Ankara probably nearly choked on one of those sweet Turkish teas from sheer joy. Trump just opened the door for him to continue doing exactly what he already does anyway, namely killing Kurds without having to fear American resistance.

And then came the climax, which cannot really be called a climax anymore because every sentence before it already qualified as one. The Iran ceasefire. Trump says he did not read the document. He says so himself. It was “incredibly weak” and “garbage.” He stopped after a few lines because he “didn’t want to waste his time.” Instead, he turns to Dr. Oz, a television doctor he somehow dragged into government service, and compares the ceasefire to a dying patient in intensive care whose doctor explains that their loved one has “about a one percent chance of surviving.” That is how a president speaks about a process involving the lives of millions of people in the Middle East. With the language of a reality show host building suspense before a commercial break.

You read all this and think there must surely be somebody left tugging at his sleeve. A chief of staff, a vice president, any adult remaining in the room. But the adults are all gone, fired, resigned or transformed themselves into children just to avoid standing out. What remains is a man behind a desk jumping between maternal health and nuclear negotiations as if they were commercial interruptions, achieving that grand level of childish Caesarism where nobody even knows anymore whether to laugh, cry or simply leave the country.

The worst part is not that he says these things. The worst part is that nobody notices anymore. Ten years ago, every single one of these statements would have been a scandal lasting weeks. Today they are four sentences before lunch, and four more arrive in the afternoon. The world has become accustomed to insanity, and that is the real diagnosis. Trump is not the illness. The illness is the patience of a public that still believes this will somehow pass on its own. It will not. It gets worse every single day in exact proportion to how much people allow it to.

A warning label would not be enough anymore. You would need an entire filing cabinet full of warnings, and in the end it would probably contain only one sentence: Do not take without medical advice. But the medical advice does not exist. There is only Dr. Oz inside the Oval Office, and he nods.