Say what you like about Donald Trump, but he dishes it out to his friends’ faces, not just behind their backs. The polite half of the world was horrified when the US President invoked the attack on Pearl Harbour in front of the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.
Japan’s first woman PM, a conservative who styles herself on Margaret Thatcher, won a genuine landslide election recently, unlike Trump, who often boasts he did. But this didn’t spare this new Iron Lady from being the butt of his joke.
Asked by a Japanese reporter why the US didn’t give allies like Japan the heads up before attacking Iran, Trump replied: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan… Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbour?”
Takaichi looked mildly startled, but kept her cool. It’s become something of a tradition for Trump to rib his guests. When the German chancellor Friedrich Merz mentioned D-Day on a visit to Washington last June, Trump jumped in ungallantly with: “This was not a pleasant day for you.”
Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa was offered Trump-branded cologne for himself and his wife at the White House in October. “How many [wives] do you have, one?” the President laughed. “One,” Al-Sharaa smiled, receiving a hearty slap on the back from Trump and the wisecrack, “With you guys, I never know.”
Vice-President JD Vance praised Trump back then for his “amazing comedic timing”. The wildly politically incorrect Pearl Harbour joke has become the latest Rorschach test of how a divided America views its President. For some, it was laugh-out-loud funny, for others, a wretched affair.
Mehdi Hasan, the left-wing founder of media company Zeteo, got it about right when he said the Pearl Harbour remark was “legit hilarious. If only he wasn’t the President and just a character on TV. We could laugh our heads off without any sense of unease, dread or embarrassment.”
Trump has always been a funny guy, if you enjoy biting humour. Satirists and comedians make a living from this stuff. The difference is the joke is now on him. No amount of needling his visitor got him what he wanted in the form of concrete help securing the Strait of Hormuz, not least because of Japanese constitutional constraints.
White House advisers have been tiptoeing around Trump. It’s a case of “don’t mention the war” – the Iran war, that is – because the President doesn’t want to hear anything he disagrees with.
Joe Kent, the counter-terrorism director who resigned this week over Iran, told broadcaster Tucker Carlson that, “a good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the President… There wasn’t a robust debate.”
If anyone is a bunker, it’s Trump. Astonishingly, he claimed on his Truth Social platform that he “always” thought Kent was “very weak on security”, yet appointed Kent – who has embraced wacky conspiracy theories such as the FBI being secretly behind the 6 January riot at the Capitol – to this key intelligence post only last year.
During his first presidential term, Trump dropped the usual daily intelligence briefings to twice a week. In May, Politico reported that Trump had only had 12 intelligence briefings since his re-election – one a fortnight until March, then once a week.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and long-time opponent of war on Iran, told a gobsmacked Senate intelligence committee this week that “only” Trump could decide on security threats. “It is not a responsibility of the intelligence community to determine what is or is not an imminent threat,” she said.
Trump has been melting down over questioning by the press, telling a woman reporter who asked about sending an initial 2,500 marines to the Middle East, “you’re a very obnoxious person,” and threatening media outlets with treason for disseminating alleged fake news.
With petrol prices rising nearly 30 per cent since the start of the war, or $1 a gallon, Americans are not laughing at Trump’s suggestion that America may hit Iran’s strategic Kharg Island “a few more times just for fun”. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 59 per cent of Americans think the economy is getting worse, with only 16 per cent thinking it is improving.
The same poll reveals that 36 per cent of US adults approve of Trump’s handling of the Iran war, compared to 56 per cent who disapprove. Trump is bleeding support among independents, who oppose the war by 63 per cent to 24 per cent.
The best joke of the week came not from Trump but from Jon Stewart, the late-night host of The Daily Show, who invited a “panel” of four Trumps to debate the Iran war – variously President Trump, Donald J Trump, DJT and John Barron (the fake name Trump used to gossip about himself to the tabloids in the 1980s).
“Let’s just start with the basics,” Stewart said. “There’s been some confusion as to whether we are even at war.” Can you clarify that? he asks. The Trumps go on to give different answers.
With the Pentagon sending three additional warships and thousands more Marines to the Middle East this weekend, it’s no longer a laughing matter.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting
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