BREAKING….Trump Just revealed a disastrous error he made – and revealed just how unstable he is….FULL STORY ⬇️ ⬇️

BREAKING….Trump Just revealed a disastrous error he made – and revealed just how unstable he is….FULL STORY ⬇️ ⬇️

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

An old saying holds that “there is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep”. Who first said this is uncertain, but if they watched President Donald Trump’s press conference on Thursday, in which he showed himself sunk deep in delusions about his attack on Iran, they might confess themselves mistaken.

Far more terrifying than a deranged sheep is a US leader, a man able to destroy the planet, being detached from reality, looking increasingly paranoid, threatening violence against others and, in the most serious cases, committing actual violence against perceived enemies.

Though Trump showed signs of chronic instability during his first term in the White House, these have become more florid and consequential since he was re-elected in 2024, and especially since the launch of a surprise attack on Iran in association with Israel in the midst of diplomatic negotiations that were making progress.

Three weeks into the war, he still cannot give a coherent explanation as to why he started it and why it is in America’s best interest. As for its devastating impact on the world economy, his response has been to deny that his “short-term excursion” is having such a calamitous effect, though every screen in the world is showing towering flames and black smoke shooting up from the oil and gas fields of the Gulf.

I used to quote a former aide of Trump who described the President as “a cunning nutter” because the phrase succinctly summed up his bizarre mix of shrewd political operator and all-too-real nuttiness. Neither were to be underestimated, but it is in his second term – and above all in the last few weeks – that the shrewdness has diminished and the nuttiness deepened.

Deterioration in Trump’s judgement is often compared to the megalomania shown by several world leaders who came to believe that they possessed semi-divine powers. This led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 and Vladimir Putin Ukraine in 2022 – and Trump to attack Iran on 28 February, 2026, in apparent expectation of a quick victory.

As with the disastrous Iraqi and Russian invasions, his decision was encouraged by his tight circle of courtiers, while sceptics were ignored or demonised as disloyal. Megalomania is common among the powerful, but in Trump’s case it combines with pre-existing traits, such as a lack of conscience, remorse, truthfulness or empathy which may go along with impulsiveness and over-confidence.

Yet, deeper questions must be asked about why a person with such a personality should have become US President? In many societies, his glaring faults would disbar him from holding any post of authority, but Americans have twice voted to send him to the White House. Why do his failings make such an exact – and for him productive – fit as an antidote or disguise for the failings of America? American and European commentators may be too invested in a benign vision of America – even when they detest Trump – to take an unsparingly objective view of what his imperial dominance tells us about the United States.

Profound, if unsettling, explanations for America’s embrace of Trump come from the Vietnamese political commentator, Sony Thang, who shows no such pro-American inhibitions. Writing on X, he says: “There is a stage of decline where empire no longer seeks competent managers. It seeks performers… That is Trump’s function. America has lost wars, lost trust, lost legitimacy, lost the future. Trump converts decay into theater. He takes civilizational shame and recycles it as swagger… Takes moral collapse and sells it as strength. He is not solving the contradiction [between the two]. He is making it dance. That is why he fascinates even those who fear him. He turns decomposition into content.”

All too true, a skilled and experienced performer like Trump is able to get away with incompetence, theatrics, swagger, moral collapse and national decline for an astonishingly long period. Failures are simply relabelled as successes. But the one door the performer must never open is the one that leads to war, when mendacity and gross errors are paid for in human blood.

Trump has now made this mistake and it has instantly shown up his inability to deal with a real crisis. This happened before not in war but at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when he suggested exploring the idea that people might inject themselves with disinfectant to escape the coronavirus.

A feature of all-powerful and paranoid leaders is that they are easily manipulated by those able to exploit their fears and fantasies. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an expert at doing just that and persuaded Trump – reportedly at the end of last year – that victory against Iran would be cheap, easy and in American interests.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war with Iran,” wrote Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, lucidly summing up what happened in his resignation letter this week. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

An allegation against Trump is that he does not have an endgame in Iran, but this not entirely correct because his ultimate aim is to make America, allied to Israel, permanently dominant in the Middle East. To do this, they need to knock out Iran as a regional rival. Israel’s strategy is clear cut: assassinate enemy leaders and carry out a scorched earth policy in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Whole societies are targeted. Israel might like regime change in Iran, but its primary purpose is to degrade the country in every way so it ceases to be a player in the geopolitics of the region, whoever holds power in Tehran.

Trump sounds baffled that America’s military strength is not translating into political gains. So far, the Iranian government shows no sign of splitting, capitulating or losing control, despite the killing of so many of its leading figures. Paradoxically, the US is today politically weaker and Iran politically stronger than they were three weeks ago because the Iranian regime has survived so far and, furthermore, has gained leverage by showing that it can inflict devastating damage on the world economy. The US is weaker than it was simply by failing to defeat Iran and is blamed internationally for deliberately causing an economic disaster.

As the world economy shudders because of the war he began, Trump is reduced to bombastic declarations of victory over Iran, comically interspersed with promises not to harm its oil and gas industry, to stop Israel doing so, and wild threats to do terrible things to Iran if it retaliates. “I will do such things – what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth,” says King Lear in a famous scene. “Oh fool, I shall go mad!”

Further thoughts
I was writing meaty thoughts about the US and Israeli attack on Iran, when I was suddenly engulfed by a more local crisis – the outbreak of meningitis B MenB ) in Canterbury where I live. Suddenly, we were topping the national news as alarm spread on Sunday after two young people died and several others were confirmed as having contracted the disease. Initial cases involved people who had attended super-spreading events at Club Chemistry night club on 5-7 March.

I had often stood waiting for a taxi outside Canterbury East station opposite the front door of Club Chemistry housed in a red brick Victorian building. When I visited it on Tuesday it was understandably shut and a deep clean was reportedly going on inside – though I wonder if it will survive its current unwanted fame.

Nobody was about when I was there, aside from a camera crew who were just packing up. I drove to the University of Kent, high on a hill overlooking Canterbury, where I saw students queuing up to get antibiotics in the Senate building. Those I spoke to did not sound particularly worried, possibly because those most panicked had already left the campus. A member of the university kitchen staff pointed out to me that this is the last week of term, and many of the students normally leave early and the meningitis outbreak had simply speeded up the exodus. This point is of importance because media reports give the impression that there are still 5,000 students at the university ready to be vaccinated, when in reality they are scattered across the country. These are presumably traceable but the vaccination campaign will be more complex than it looks.

I wrote a lengthy report on the outbreak published in The i Paper, but let me add some details and thoughts not included there: everybody’s reaction – public, politicians, health experts, media – to meningitis is entirely conditioned by their experience of the Covid-19 epidemic. Out and about in Canterbury, I felt I was in a time machine taking me back to 2020. At that time, it was at first surprising and alarming to see so many wearing face masks, but when they sprouted everywhere in Canterbury this week, it almost felt like a return to normality.

How to describe the mood in the city? Only five local schools have closed so far as I know, so the morning and afternoon traffic still clogs the medieval street I live in. At the time of writing there are 29 confirmed and suspected cases, making it an unprecedented outbreak for MenB in the UK. Does this mean a new more invasive strain? Has it peaked? (we were always asking these questions during the pandemic)?

Alarm has grown since earlier in the week. This is understandable: one child in a coma in one large school will terrify all the parents. So, obviously, MenB is our main topic of conversation in the city: “So what is your favourite theory about where the meningitis came from?” I heard one woman sing out to another across a near empty restaurant.

As a superspreading hub, Club Chemistry would be difficult to beat. “People jam packed together and plenty of snogging,” commented a taxi driver. Student accommodation at the university with five or six students sharing a kitchen would also make transmission of the illness easier. But with so many students already gone, a single student left behind will worry about falling ill and nobody within calling distance to summon help.

Key to the future is speed of transmission of the illness, which should become clear in the next few days.

Beneath the radar
The confrontation between Shia and Sunni Muslims has been a central feature in Middle East politics since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Up to about six years ago the story was of the inexorable rise of the Shia communities from Yemen to Lebanon to Iraq, but now this is going into reverse. Targeted by Israel, US and the Sunni Arab states, they have their backs to the wall.

The Shia-Sunni struggle was at its most violent and prolonged in Iraq between 2003 and 2017. The Shia majority, roughly 60 per cent of the 46 million Iraqi population, replaced the Sunni Arabs, some 20 per cent, as the dominant sect (the Kurds make up another 20 per cent). Two Sunni insurrections against the US occupation and Shia rule, the second led by Islamic State (Isis), were defeated by 2019. “The Sunni have been marginalised in the Baghdad power structure since the US invasion in 2003,” an Iraqi friend and close observer of the political scene, told me. “Now the Sunni want to make a comeback. Sunni tribal and business leaders are making contacts with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates – and even Israel – looking for support.

The Sunni in Iraq had already been strengthened with the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, the core of whose regime were the Alawites (a Shia sect) who was overthrown in 2024. Sunni Arabs of northern and western Iraq now look to a friendly Sunni-dominated, anti-Iranian regime across the border in Syria. The other great buttress of the Iraqi Shia has been Shia Iran, but these now have their own troubles.

From the start of the Iran war in 1980 to the defeat of Isis in 2017, there was a permanent and bloody political crisis in Iraq. Is that crisis now coming back? The complex carve up of political and economic power in Iraq is inevitably destabilised by the US-Israel attack on Iran.

After 2003, the US and Iran openly competed and covertly cooperated in preserving an unstable balance of power in Iraq. That cooperation is now dead. Iran will look to use the 100,000 strong pro-Iranian popular mobilisation units or Hashd al-Shaabi in its favour and against the US and its allies. These paramilitaries are already attacking US bases and facilities in Iraq including the US embassy. They are also accused of firing drones into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Israeli and US airstrikes have hit Hashd headquarters, camps and arms depots.

Battles for political power in Iraq are hard fought because they are at bottom a battle for a share in Iraq’s oil revenues that have hovered a bit below $100bn a year. The Hashd are well integrated into the Iraqi government, which pays their salaries and gives them a kleptocratic share of the Iraqi economic pie. “Several Hashd commanders are billionaires,” one Iraqi political observer told me. “They don’t want to lose their power to make money.” They probably do not want to join the war on Iran’s side, but they also may not have much choice.

Iraq has a sort of Tammany Hall-type system in which job and money are distributed through a quota-type system. This has kept going because it is fuelled by Iraq’s oil revenues. This pays the 4.5 million government employees and three million government employees on pension. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran threatens to upend this whole rickety structure because Iraq has – unlike the Arab oil states of the Gulf – few financial reserves.

If the Iran war goes on it will be impossible for Iraq to avoid being sucked in. The Iraq crisis is back in business.

Cockburn’s picks
A good succinct account of what is happening in the under-reported war in Lebanon by Lebanese commentator Ali Harb. Some of what he says may also apply to Iran.