Brendan Hoban: A narcissistic bully now leads the free world                

Western People 11.03.2025

Instinctively, when a pack gathers to hunt down a quarry – whether hounds baying for a kill or a human being cornered by his or her critics – the fear (whatever its origin) is usually evident in the eyes of the hunted.

Recently when Verona Murphy, on her first day as the newly-elected Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann, was shouted down by a pack of braying TDs (mostly men), her fear was evident. As was the fear in the eyes of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he found himself in the Oval Office in Washington, the subject of a mugging by President Trump and Vice-president Vance and a stander-by who set the ball rolling by dressing down Zelensky for not wearing a suit and a tie!

It was a run-in to an historic interlude designated by one commentator as ‘five minutes that changed the world’ during which the long-vaunted close relationship between America and Europe that had survived the test of centuries lay broken on the floor of the Oval Office. Suddenly secure political entities like NATO on which the safety of the world depended no longer held firm. And presiding over the incipient fracturing of NATO was the haunting spectre of a Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, licking his lips in anticipation of pursuing his campaign to polish off a weakened Ukraine and one by one to set his sights on whatever pickings were next in line in Europe. The historic sway exerted by the United States of America as the driving force keeping the totemic Russian Bear under the cosh was no more. A political Armageddon (it seemed) was on hand.

What we witnessed on television was a recalcitrant bully surrounded by fawning supporters and annoyed that the president of Ukraine was not prepared to join a compliant consensus and concede what his (Trump’s) narcissistic personality demanded in rifling Ukraine of its minerals and delivering that country into the convenient arms of Putin.

Trump, presented regularly now as a classic case of narcissism, is only happy if he is in the centre of every stage with a spotlight fixed definitively on himself. A nightmare to work with, Trump has an insatiable need to dominate the headlines every day regardless of how bizarre or outlandish his position and what matters is not whether any of it makes any sense but how it makes Trump feel.  Maureen Dowd, a columnist of the New York Times, concluded: ‘Everyone is so obsequious around Trump that he now gets huffy at the least pushback. If anyone points out that he is wrong, he blows a gasket’.

The historian, Max Hastings, recently pointed to a more chilling truth – ‘With the Americans offering shameless support to Putin and shameless animosity to Zelensky, the Europeans lack the military power and, probably also the will, to protect Ukraine’. And Trump’s bullying attitude to Zelensky in the Oval Office stood in marked contrast to Zelensky’s modest ambition (as he told Fox News, a pro-Trump media voice) that all he (Zelensky) wanted was ‘to hear that America is for our side, not for the Russians.’

The problem is that Trump, even though the voters of the USA have democratically invested him with supreme executive power, is no ordinary president for whom words mean what the rest of us mean by them and reality (as we know it) is for him a moveable feast. What Zelensky and Starmer and the rest of the obviously sane politicians are dealing with is a man who lives in a bubble of acquiescence, a dream world where he is always right and cannot be told that he is wrong – or ever made a mistake.

Trump’s personality has sometimes been described as ‘pathologically damaged’. Thus he casually cancels articles in the American Constitution in relation to citizenship because he finds them inconvenient. He governs by issuing executive orders as if he were an absolute monarch. And truth and lies mean what he wants them to mean. And, of course, peace for the Ukraine is important for Trump not because it would save lives or end a long nightmare for Ukraine but because he wants to be lauded as a peacemaker and, it is said, he has high expectations of winning the Nobel Prize for his peace-making achievements.

No wonder he had to resort before the eyes of the world to bullying Zelensky who is, after all, just the President of Ukraine so his views or those of Ukraine don’t really matter in the grand scheme of Trump’s narcissistic plans for himself.

For Trump, Zelensky is no more than an irritant whose role is to thank (and to keep thanking) Trump and America for what they’ve done for Ukraine. Outrageously, as far as Trump is concerned, Zelensky believes that the Ukrainian people have a right to a say in their future. When he attempted to make this simple and indisputable point in the Oval Office debacle, Trump told him that he was starting World War Three and Trump’s acolyte Vance (whose only role now in American politics is to make Trump feel good about himself) chimed in accusing him of supporting Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

What is truly extraordinary is that Trump has now aligned American policy with that of the Kremlin. Even though all the polls are indicating that Americans oppose Putin by a consistently huge majority – 80% to 90%, Trump under the guise of bringing peace to Ukraine has now decided, by today’s RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, ‘to pause and review America’s aid to Ukraine’, a decision which if it becomes permanent would substantially undermine the Ukraine war effort and deliver Ukraine to Putin.

It prompts the $60,000 question as to why Trump is apparently in Putin’s pocket. Lara Marlowe asks it in a recent Irish Times piece. And on BBC 2’s Newsnight programme the journalist, Michael Wolff, who has long charted Trump’s political fortunes most recently in his book All Or Nothing, concludes that Putin must have something on Trump.

Hard times are on their way, a la Trump.