Trump is worse than a bully; he plays with the brutality of those who flout the rules. And for now, the memes are winning

It is pointless and even grotesque – albeit formally correct – to rail against Trump’s bullying, to express solidarity with Giorgia Meloni, and to pretend that personal relationships must mirror those between diplomatic corps and states, characterised by mutual respect. Trump said of Macron that ‘his wife had been very hard on him’, and that ‘he has not yet recovered from her right hook to the jaw’. Macron is not merely the head of government; as an elected president, he symbolically represents and embodies the entire French nation – that is, the European country which made possible the victory over the British in the War of Independence, which has just been commemorated. In legal and diplomatic parlance in such cases – particularly in relations between states – one issues a ‘fin de non-recevoir’. Unacceptable. Inadmissible. Full stop. Yet it is a full stop only up to a point. There is something to unpack here. It has nothing to do with Meloni’s efforts to champion Western unity, or to shift the narrative in the face of the anti-European provocations of the tycoon-turned-president, with his childish language and extremely vulgar manner – which is only rarely witty. Trump is the sort of man who can say, with impunity, during the funeral of the man he killed in war: “We could wipe out everyone at Khamenei’s funeral, but then we’d have no one to negotiate with.” He began his career by surly mistreating a disabled man and speaking in a suggestive tone about the menstrual cycle of a journalist he disliked. Quite simply, he is a brute, far more so than a bully. But not all brutes are stupid, although not all of them realise that by going too far in their brutality, one can end up doing oneself a great deal of harm – which would seem to be his case today (let’s keep our fingers crossed for the elections next November). Beyond that, Trump senses, with his special instinctive “subtlety”, that his electoral base adores the utterly inappropriate substitution of personal language – in its grim psychological truth – for the wooden language of diplomatic relations, with all its rules.Trump’s supporters detest rules, and deep down in the hearts of many who do not belong to that camp, a failure to observe the norms of courtesy and good manners evokes a sense of power; and the more one strays from the norm, the closer one comes – especially if one is at the helm of a nation that leads the way in arms, technology and ambition – to a kind of omnipotence. Speaking of omnipotence, we must not forget that Trump did not merely criticise Pope Leo – which would be normal, or nearly so – but mocked the Holy Spirit, who, for the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel – ‘veni creator spiritus’ – is the ultimate source of inspiration, following what may well have been all too human deliberations, in the election of a Roman Pontiff. ‘Without me,’ he boasted, ‘Leo would never have become Pope.’