President Donald Trump continues to demonstrate behavior showing that he is "detached" and "losing his grip on reality," according to a new breakdown from The i Paper, and his latest international "outburst" offers proof.
Trump this weekend visited Ireland for what was supposed to be a minor trip to a golf tournament with a brief stop to meet the country's leader, Taoiseach Micheál Martin. While speaking with the press, however, he hit a raw geopolitical nerve and came close to sparking an international incident when he said that Ireland and Northern Ireland would be unified, seeming to suggest that the eventuality was both imminent and inevitable.
“I’d love to see it [Ireland] unified,” Trump said. “I have friends on both sides. Great people. They’re Irish people – how can they be bad? You know what: it’s going to happen eventually, so it might as well happen now… I think it would be a fantastic thing... I think it would be a great thing. How could it be bad?”
Discussing the comments in a new piece published Monday, i Paper columnist Simon Kelner said that Trump appeared to realize "that he may have stepped into a diplomatic fly-trap" with that remark, given that he also added, "the UK will have something to say about it. Obviously."
"Really? After centuries of struggles and bloodshed and sectarian division, the British government may have an opinion on this most contentious and defining of political issues?" Kelner wrote. "Whatever made him think that?"
Kelner further argued that Trump's Ireland comments are the latest in a string of increasingly bizarre behaviors, ones which make him seem like a sort of "anti-President," given his tendency to blurt out things a major world leader should know to avoid.
"Trump has been acting in an increasingly bizarre way," Kelner explained. "One recent weekend saw him take to social media with AI images that showed him intimidating Canada’s Prime Minister with a hockey stick and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries. There were tributes to himself as 'the Greatest President of All Time!' In all, he posted 60 times in a little more than 10 hours."
He added: "He is the anti-President, the world leader who doesn’t behave like one, who’s capable of acting in the way an ordinary, uninformed citizen might, expressing certainties that are based only on sketchy knowledge and predicting outcomes as “inevitable” because his instinct says so. That’s what makes his intervention in the Irish debate so manifestly wrong. Irish unification is not a matter to be decided on the personal whim of an American President, settled over a pint of the black stuff and a handshake. The lack of respect this shows for history, culture, religion and politics is quite jaw-dropping, even by Trumpian standards."
Kelner suggested that this behavior was not evidence of some new development in which Trump has "gone crazy." Rather, it is evidence of "how detached the American President is from reality, and how dangerous that may be for the world."
