Trump’s method is his madness

Donald Trump is depicted as impulsive and unpredictable. But this view is mistaken. There is method — albeit an evil method — in his madness. His behaviour in the build-up to next week’s US midterm elections highlights this side of the president. He has been consistent and unscrupulous in pursuing it. At least three of Trump’s recent actions can only be adequately explained by this strategy.

In the first, he has ordered 5,200 American troops to the US-Mexico border. The objective is not to respond to a crisis — several thousand National Guard are already there, as well as border police — but to create one. Trump wants to make a show of force against a caravan of migrants from Central America, which he has mischievously described as an invasion.

The second example of Trump’s cynicism is his response to the slaughter of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. This week, as the first dead from the synagogue gun massacre were being buried, he visited Pittsburgh in the teeth of widespread opposition from many of the families of the victims. Why behave this way? Not because he is a national uniter, as other presidents have tried to be at such moments, but because he is a divider and a provoker.

Trump has also chosen this moment to try to end the right to American citizenship of babies born in the US to noncitizens. He is himself the son of an immigrant mother, the US constitution has recognised this birthright for over 150 years, and it is doubtful he could simply order the change as he pretends. But the president is determined to do everything to make immigration and that means race the explicit centrepiece of these elections. /London, November 1