Trump has a plan. Doesn’t he?

THEY say that if you put a frog into cold water and then gradually start heating up the water, the frog will just sit there and be boiled to death, whereas if you throw the frog straight into boiling water he will jump out. Not true, but a handy metaphor for where we find ourselves.

If someone had told you a few years ago that Donald Trump would be president of America, and that he would be threatening to start a nuclear war with the most insane leader in the world, and that he would be dong it via Twitter, you would have pictured international chaos. You would have imagined a scenario of people fleeing cities, looting supermarkets for canned goods, worldwide panic. But because we got to this boiling point gradually, and because our barometer for craziness has been slowly, day by day, tampered with, we are all strangely calm. It’s possibly the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine. It’s just another lazy Sunday in August. Families are not gathered around TV sets eager for the latest news. There are no public service announcements about what to do in the event of a nuclear war. We are largely just shrugging our shoulders and thinking, “this is more of it”.

Every day, we cross another Rubicon. Now we have the strange spectacle of the president of China urging Trump to calm down. When the president of China is the reasonable one, then we’re in trouble.

If Trump were a guy in a bar now, it would be time for his friends to take him home. Not only is he squaring up to a Korean lunatic, and talking about being “locked and loaded”, he has also got into a side-skirmish with the Venezuelans, another crazy totalitarian regime against which he is threatening to go to war. The Venezuelan president has been responding robustly, on, obviously, Twitter. Again, if you had heard a few years ago that a South American quasi-dictator would be conducting international relations through Twitter, you would have thought, “well this is a bit crazy”. But here we are now, and the president of America is doing it, too. In fact, he’s the one who began using Twitter to conduct international relations and start wars.

When Trump first appeared on the scene they were innocent times — offensiveness to women, grabbing them by the pussy, the whole Mexican wall business all now seems benignly quaint. Back then Trump seemed to have no interest in foreign policy or wars. The whole insular ‘America first’ era now seem like good times indeed.

But still, we’re not panicking yet. Because we know that there’s no way Trump will start a war, and let’s face it, conventional wisdom has never been wrong about Trump before, has it?

Let’s just hope this is all a clever plan, and it will all be fine.