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Trump’s business career has long been characterized as embodying “con-artist” tactics: aggressive promotion, leveraging his personal brand for high-margin or low-substance ventures, heavy debt leverage, selective truth-stretching in marketing, and frequent legal disputes.
There is a particular kind of political confidence that is indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, from clinical detachment from reality. It is the confidence of a man who, having just won a hand at poker, concludes that the laws of probability no longer apply to him. It announces itself loudly, dresses in a flag, and mistakes the echo of its own voice for the applause of nations. Ladies and gentlemen, Reform UK Ltd has had a good week at the local elections, and the results are as instructive as they are alarming, not merely because Nigel Farage’s vehicle of nationalist ambition has won council seats, but because winning appears to have emboldened the party to say the quiet parts of its manifesto even louder, with the serene self-assurance of people who have never had to read a treaty.
Start with the constitutional oddity sitting in plain sight. The Board's Charter names Donald Trump personally not the office of the President, not the United States as a state party, but Donald J. Trump as inaugural Chairman, with a term that survives his presidency. He can only be removed through voluntary resignation or a unanimous vote of the Executive Board finding him incapacitated, and he alone selects his successor. No sitting president inherits the chair by virtue of the office; a future occupant of the Oval Office might find themselves outranked, within an organisation their own government helped charter, by a private citizen of their predecessor's choosing.
Whether the subject is healthcare, trade, infrastructure, peace in the Middle East or now Iran, there is a familiar rhythm. An announcement. A flourish. A declaration that success is “very close.” Then another announcement. Then another. Like a magician whose favourite trick is promising that the rabbit will appear in just one more hat.
For over three decades, the South Carolina Republican became one of Washington’s most recognisable political figures, surviving scandals, ideological earthquakes, party revolutions and presidential feuds with the resilience of a cactus in a drought
