The Nobel Peace Prize is usually announced on Friday on the first full week of October. This year it will be October 11. If Donald Trump is able to get both Putin and Zelenskyy wrapped up by the end of August, Trump’s fantasy might well begin to look real. At least one of the countries is a nuclear power, which helps in the citation. But the window of opportunity is fast closing. It will help if Putin endorses him too. Zelenskyy might prove a little tricky. That’s the problem with stand-up comedians, as we all know in this part of the world. Zelenskyy’s arm has been twisted quite a bit, once quite openly in the White House and on Prime Time. That leaves other parts of his body that can be worked over, though. This is where the rest come in: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who sometimes gives the impression that he is Trump’s ventriloquist’s doll; those Pentagon guys who are currently in favour; and that NATO chief, Mark Rutte, who ought to be wearing a MAGA cap and sounds as though he voted more than once for Trump and in more than one American polling booth in the same election and even stands ready to annex Greenland for Trump. You know, the rest of Trump’s in-crowd, who now include Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Delhi is not part of those folks right now, although it is possible to discern that Delhi desperately wants Putin and Zelenskyy to kiss and make up after the August 15 meeting between Trump and Putin. We will come to that. Not because it is a time for peace, as the MEA so fervently put it, endorsing the proposed Alaska meet. But because there is a faint possibility that New Delhi could be let off the tariffs hook. The reason goes that if Russia is no longer a pariah, then Trump has no reason to be so worked up about New Delhi being the Tariff King. There is a theory that Trump is worked up because New Delhi did not endorse his name for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a smart theory. Maybe even a good one. You and I know that it is silly to nominate someone like Trump for it. Some respected American shrinks will say it is akin to endorsing Mussolini or Hitler. Normally, you wouldn’t need any backing up for this comparison, but I checked. In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess A President (St Martin’s Press, New York), there are as many as 59 references to Hitler where Trump is concerned. It is an interesting book, one that posits that Trump could be off his rocker in more ways than one, especially with the nuclear button in his command. In the previous edition of the book, only 27 very well-established mental health experts thought so. More are since convinced.
One of them quotes Dr James F. Gilligan, a psychiatrist and author who has studied the motivations behind violent behaviour over his twenty-five years of work in the American prison systems, as observing, “I don’t say Trump is Hitler or Mussolini, but he’s no more normal than Hitler.” (P109)
For those looking for a strong silver lining, a comprehensive study of thirty-seven US presidents up to 1974 determined that nearly half of them had a diagnosable mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. That would be till Richard Nixon, the US president Trump has sometimes been compared with, who was seriously paranoid and is said to have maintained an `Enemies List’. Nixon’s enemies were political opponents. Not having craved the Nobel Peace Prize, he kept it within his borders, with exceptions like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which he secretly bombed when they were on his menu. Not Trump. He is a Major League. For Trump, the entire world is his oyster, not just Southeast Asia. The world doesn’t have a say in it, in his extreme manipulation of reality.
Let’s bring up Tony Schwartz to tell us about it. Tony co-authored The Art of the Deal with Trump. He says, “Lying is second nature to him … More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” (P 261). Schwartz recounts, “In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration. Many of the deals in The Art of the Deal were massive failures… Trump had me describe each of them as a huge success. Facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down—even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump would see no contradiction at all in changing his story... His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.”
This is where it gets interesting. Schwartz reveals that “in the hundreds of Trump’s phone calls I listened in on with his consent, and the dozens of meetings I attended with him, I can never remember anyone disagreeing with him about anything. The same climate of fear and paranoia appears to have taken root in his White House.”
This is the prism through which to view Trump’s repeated claims (36 times and counting) on playing peacemaker on India’s May skirmish with Pakistan. The more Trump asserts it, the more real it becomes to him. That means, the more it is denied, the more worked up Trump gets and the more he asserts it. It is all in his mind, which 37 respected observers of the mentally challenged say could be bit of a mess. There will be more saying so in the next edition. White House has released no evidence and no transcripts to demonstrably back Trump’s claim up to the hilt. Which is why August 15 is a kind of a Red Letter Day. We wait for what emerges both from Alaska and Red Fort.
V. Sudarshan is Editor, Free Press Journal
