BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI | If Trump had been president in World War 2, would we all be speaking German?

One American critic was scathing in his review of President Donald Trump’s interminable state of the union address, the longest in recent history, describing it as “preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional”. A bit bombastic perhaps, but it seemed to capture a widely held view.

Trump himself described what he inherited from his predecessor in characteristic stark and exaggerated terms. “When I last spoke in the chamber 12 months ago,” he told his audience, “I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide-open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world. Tonight, after just one year, I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no-one has ever seen before. A turnaround for the ages.”

Trump tells such a fusillade of lies it’s often difficult to keep up or refute them. Our pundit said simply that what the president boasted about was hallucinatory. The New York Times said the speech contained a list of “familiar falsehoods and inaccurate claims”. That’s code for telling barefaced lies. American media are often more deferential to authority.

The speech was obviously aimed at a domestic audience. The midterm elections in November could clip Trump’s wings if the Democrats were to retake, especially, the House of Representatives. He was therefore accounting to his electors. Singing for his supper, if you like.

Unpredictable. The goalposts keep moving. Threats and insults are his staple diet

But capitals around the world would have spent some time parsing the whole speech, desperate for a few promising nuggets or a pointer to a new or more accommodating direction. There were no such pickings, however. In the second year of his second term, Trump is still difficult to read. If anything, he’s more combative, belligerent and easy to take offence. Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma”. He could have had Trump in mind. If Trump, not Franklin D Roosevelt, was US president during World War 2, for instance, we’d probably all be speaking German. Unpredictable. The goalposts keep moving. Threats and insults are his staple diet.

He’s desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize, and yet he’s too quick to the draw. Bombing Venezuela for its oil and kidnapping its leader, however unacceptable he may be, is not the doing of a man interested in solving conflicts through peaceful means. He scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran simply because it was negotiated by Barack Obama, his nemesis. Now he’s gone to war with the Iranians, which threatens to destabilise the entire Middle East. The message to the Iranians is quite clear: submit or else.

The capture of Nicolás Maduro and the ease with which it was accomplished seems to have whetted Trump’s appetite for more such adventures in the region. Cuba seems a more enticing target. But, of course, he’ll need to tread very carefully here. Cuba, a relatively tiny island less than 200km off the Florida coast, has been a bother to the US, if not its psyche. In 1961, fresh from his inauguration, President John F Kennedy’s administration dispatched a CIA-funded ragtag army of Cuban exiles to the island with the aim of overthrowing Fidel Castro, the communist rebel who’d recently taken over power on the island. It was the height of the Cold War, and the US could not tolerate a communist state in its own back yard. What came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion turned out to be an unmitigated fiasco. Many of the invaders were killed, and those captured were executed. The US was left with egg on its face and has been nursing a grievance since.

Cuba has survived decades of an economic blockade, and Castro went on to outlive eight US presidents. Now Trump wants to reopen old wounds.

To be in the crosshairs of the most powerful man or economy on earth is obviously utterly unpleasant. But Trump has been rude to everybody, not least America’s so-called friends

It often feels as though Trump has singled out South Africa for some harsh treatment. He’s falsely accused the government of committing genocide, allowed its “victims” easy access to the US, cancelled all humanitarian aid and, of course, boycotted the G20 summit in South Africa last year. He has blackballed the country from its edition in the US this year.

To be in the crosshairs of the most powerful man or economy on earth is obviously utterly unpleasant. But Trump has been rude to everybody, not least America’s so-called friends. If his intention is to create enemies for the US across the globe, he seems to be going about it the right way. The only people who seem to thrive in the Trump orbit are Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. For Putin especially, Trump has been a godsend. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined a US president becoming a Russian asset, which is what Trump is.

In the current Ukraine peace negotiations, Putin looks set to get all he wants. Ukraine, the victim, is expected to make all the concessions while Russia continues to bomb its critical infrastructure and kill its people. Trump is taking advantage of the invasion to get his own back on Volodymyr Zelensky, who’s the reason he was impeached the last time he was in office.

But it is America’s European allies who must be wondering what’s hit them. The US threatening to militarily invade Greenland, administered by Denmark, a Nato ally, is certainly one for the books. Trump even sends his emissaries to lecture them on how to run their domestic affairs. Some European countries, still incredulous, have rushed to negotiate separate agreements, hoping that the crocodile will either spare them or, at worst, eat them last. They’ll learn soon — if they haven’t already — that you can’t negotiate with a bully.

It won’t be easy, but people should just bide their time. Trump will be gone in a little over three years. The only hope is that he won’t have done irreparable damage by then.