Trump uses his ultimate power to change the storyline

WHEN the grief-stricken parents of Harry Dunn met Trump last week, to talk about the US diplomat who was involved in the road accident that killed their son, Trump surprised them by telling them that the diplomat in question, Anne Sacoolas, was in another room in the building.

If anyone was in any doubt that this is essentially a TV programme he is running, this adoption of the style of The Jerry Springer Show would have clarified the matter somewhat. Likewise I am about 95pc certain that Trump abandoned the Kurds and gave the green light to Turkey so that people would have something else to see on the telly — something that wasn’t the story of his impeachment.

And we need to have a pure understanding of this, we need to be as focused as he is on the primacy of television, when we are trying to identify the ways in which he is destroying the world. Because there’s always this inclination to search for answers in that great wilderness of his black soul, but in doing this we lose sight of the clarity of his vision — he is a TV guy, now and for ever.

So when the analysts try to get their heads around the mind-boggling scandal of what Trump did to the Kurds, they sense some kind of derangement on his part — like he just couldn’t be bothered with all that foreign garbage, and put the phone down hardly even comprehending what he had just started.

Well how deranged is this? The previous week I had been watching CNN on the hour, every hour, swept along by the momentum of its reporting from Capitol Hill — they were buzzing, those liberals.

It wasn’t just that the impeachment was proceeding, it was the feeling that for once, Trump was playing a TV part that didn’t suit him — he was on the defensive, and while he always defends by attacking, in this case his attacks were so ludicrous they were just feeding his pursuers on CNN.

He knew that this was a really bad episode of his show, and he couldn’t contemplate a second week of this storyline.

So it was that last week I would turn to CNN as I had done the week before, except instead of watching the usual hunting party, I’d be watching some reporter on the Turkish border pointing to a plume of smoke somewhere off in the distance in the direction of Syria — “it’s not our problem”, Trump would later declare.

And really it’s not his problem, because for him the only version of the world that exists in any meaningful way is the one that happens on TV.

And by far the greatest power invested in him as president is this ability to change what people are watching on TV, by some disgraceful deed — he knows no other kind. Some other disgraceful deed, not the one that is playing so badly for him.

To give him his due, as an unrivalled TV professional he had been working the impeachment episode with all his might, knowing it was terrible material, but giving it a run anyway because it was all that he had — so he did that thing where he barks at the reporters while the helicopter is warming up, because it means he has to shout, and his delivery is at its best when he’s shouting.

Yet there was a basic structural problem with this story: for once, it must have felt like someone else, in this case Nancy Pelosi, was dictating the terms of the engagement.

And he fears Nancy, to the extent that he has no nickname for her character in the show — he claimed his nickname for her is “Nancy”, which eagle-eyed readers may have noted is not a nickname, but her actual name.

No, he was really hating the impeachment storyline.

So he threw in that distraction in Turkey, and a bonus episode of Jerry Springer, in which the Dunn family decided not to meet the waiting diplomat.

Their life is not a TV show — but that’s not his problem either.