The mad emperor has triggered chaos he cannot control

With no domestic institutions to restrain him, Trump has started a war which will hurt every one of us, all over the world.

Photo by Payton Tuttle on Unsplash

He woke up and accepted the adulation of his subjects. He walked between golden rooms and received his coterie of sycophants. He sat and preened and celebrated himself.

Occasionally, small half-formed intruders stumbled into his mind. These were thoughts, but he was unable to assess what they meant or could lead to. He was burdened with a sense of encroaching humiliation, a feeling of being trapped in a prison of his own making, from actions which he himself initiated. But he lacked the self-awareness to understand how he ended up in this position or the coherence with which to break out of it.

America has no president. It has an emperor. And the emperor is insane.

This is how he spends his days. Last Friday, the US Commission of Fine Arts approved a commemorative gold coin featuring Donald Trump, to celebrate America’s 250th year of independence. Federal law does not allow a living president to appear on US currency, but the law is a thing of the past which no longer troubles the American establishment. The members of the commission are acolytes, hired to worship the emperor. Last year, Trump fired all sitting members and replaced them with his loyalists. Now they think as he instructs them or as they believe he wishes them to think.

The Commission’s vice-chairman James McCrery said: “I motion to approve this as presented, and with the strong encouragement that you make it as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter.” The only quality which competes with their obsequiousness is their stupidity.

On Thursday, he held a Cabinet meeting. These have now devolved into sanctification ceremonies, a form of emperor-worship ritual. The most senior figures in the US government compete to lower themselves as close as possible to his feet as they eradicate what is left of their dignity. Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, invented an alternate version of Venezuela where they worship the American emperor. “I literally think they’re going to put up a statue to President Trump,” he said. “It’s like they view President Trump like Simón Bolívar. He’s the liberator of a country”.

Later that day, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, created a new award so that he could “honour” the emperor. “He is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First award,” he said. “That’s this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the new golden era in America.”

Afterwards, the Treasury Department announced that all American currency will be changed to feature Trump’s signature. It is the first time this has ever taken place for a sitting president. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said: “There is no more powerful way to recognise the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than US dollar bills bearing his name”.

It is bitterly ironic that a country which is famed for a constitution of checks-and-balances should have ended up so vulnerable to a leadership personality cult. The US constitution is designed in a series of elaborate countervailing tensions between legislature and judiciary and executive, the product of men who were concerned with limiting power, with strapping it in restraints and holding it down.

But a constitutional system is only as effective as the people who believe in it. You can write the constitution down in one place, as the Americans do, or have it hidden away all over the place, as we do. None of that matters. All that really matters is that people behave according to the social and moral norms it establishes. People must believe it to be true, or it is only paper. In the US, they ceased to believe it is true long ago. That is why the legislature, which lacks all self-confidence, refuses to stand up to him. It is why the judiciary, whose supreme body he partly appointed, does not restrain him. It is why the press, which is subject to its own institutional pathologies, is unable to meaningfully hold him to account.

The mad emperor is therefore allowed to do whatever he likes. He has total discretion.

One day the mad emperor woke up and decided that he wanted to bomb Iran. From that point on, a series of events took place which would impact people all over the world. It would impact people who live in high-rise apartments and rain-lashed slums, in corporate offices and rice fields, in wealthy post-industrial countries and poverty-stricken agrarian states.

It began from the first moment of the operation. The Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Southern Iran decided to close as soon as US bombing had been confirmed, at around 10am on February 28th. They called parents and asked them to pick up their children. They did not know it yet, but it was too late. The roads were congested and most parents would not make it there in time to save them.

Sometime between 10:23am and 11:47am, the school was hit in a missile strike. The roof collapsed, trapping children and teachers under rubble. The school principal seemingly managed to move a group of children to a prayer room and called parents again to have them rescue them. The school was then hit by a second strike, killing most of the children who had taken shelter. At least 175 people were killed, including over 100 children.

The US was almost certainly responsible for this strike, as officials close to the military investigation have made clear. When he was asked about it, Trump replied that “that was done by Iran”. When he was asked why he was the only one suggesting this, he replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.”

One of the defining elements of the second Trump administration is how glib and nonchalant his replies to questions are. He’s not even that angry with reporters anymore. He simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t think about these things. They do not matter to him. He is nonchalant not as a political exercise but because he is emotionally unaffected and intellectually disengaged. Core issues of war and peace are now reduced to this man uttering incoherent and internally contradictory sentences, like someone mumbling in their sleep.

Once the war began, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or rather, insurance companies closed it. Iran just had to make threats and show that it could deliver on them, the realities of modern actuarial ecosystems did the rest.

Trump had probably not considered this eventuality at all. Insofar as his military strategists had done so, they evidently believed that Iran would avoid this approach because of the damage it would inflict on their own economy. But once Trump escalated his rhetoric away from ballistic missiles and towards regime change, the existential consequences made that calculation redundant. He has created his own worst outcome, but he will never understand this and is probably not even aware that it has taken place.

The immediate impact was to oil. It is a commodity whose function is to allow for movement, so once its price rises the price of everything else rises, by virtue of the additional expenditure required to get it where it needs to be. For Trump, this will be electorally toxic. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forecasts that US inflation will surge to 4.2%, on what are pretty optimistic forecasts assuming a reduction in energy prices in June. If the conflict drags on and those reductions do not take place, the inflationary consequences will be longer and more severe.

There will be people in the US who go out of business because they cannot afford the increase in their transport budget. There will be workers who lose their jobs because the company folds or has to lay people off. In the UK and across Europe, families who are struggling to get by will go to the supermarket and see that, once again, the food they are buying is rocketing up in price. They will save, they will purchase cheaper food of a lower quality, they will give up on life’s little luxuries, like a visit to the fish and chip shop on Friday night, and in some cases they will go hungry. The emperor will not care about them. He will not recognise that they exist. He will not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just an oil chokepoint. It is much more than that. In addition to oil it is a key transit point for liquified natural gas, aluminium, helium, petrochemicals and fertiliser. What we are seeing is akin to no-deal Brexit, in military form and on a global scale. It is a system-wide event with primary, secondary and tertiary causal waves which touch nearly all areas of the economy.

The strait is the transit point for roughly 20% of global liquified natural gas. Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter, shipped 93% of its exports through Hormuz. The UAE shipped 96%. There is no pipeline alternative to the global market, as there is for oil.

People in Europe will suffer. People in the Indian subcontinent will suffer more severely. Last year, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan imported almost two-thirds of their total liquified natural gas supplies via the strait. They are particularly exposed, with serious threats to electricity supply security in Bangladesh and Pakistan particularly. The very poor will be forced into darkness. The less poor will make savings elsewhere. The emperor will not think of them.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s helium goes through the strait. This noble gas is crucial to the AI boom. It is used in the manufacture of microchips and semiconductors. It is also a key input in MRI machines, fiber optics, and aerospace applications. Sometime in the future, a promising tech start-up will never get the chance to establish itself. A medical machine will never be built. The emperor will not think about it.

Major aluminum smelters in the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia depend on the strait for export. Once the strait closed, prices sky-rocketed. This will soon drive up the price of the products in sectors which use it as an input, including automotive, aerospace, and construction. The great industrial engines in Europe and the US will suffer once more. Workers will be left in a more precarious position than they would have been otherwise.The emperor will not think of them.

One of the most severe consequences concerns fertiliser. It cannot be rerouted. There are no pipelines. There are no strategic reserves.

The Strait of Hormuz is required for over 30% of the world trade in ammonia, nearly 50% of urea and 20% of diammonium phosphate - all key inputs in fertiliser production. Since the war began, prices have soared. Urea prices at the New Orleans import hub jumped over 30%, from $475–$516 to roughly $680 per metric ton. In the Middle East, the price of Urea went up by 19% in the first week of March. In Egypt it went up by 28%.

There is a secondary impact from the restrictions on natural gas, which is a key feedstock for nitrogenous-based fertilisers. This makes the upward pressure on costs even more severe. Fertiliser firms in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have shut down production without access to natural gas from Qatar.

There will then be a third inflationary impact from restrictions on ongoing exports. Brazil, for instance, imports 85% of its fertiliser. It is then uses it in soybean production, where it is a major exporter and global price-setter. Three quarters of China’s soybean imports are from Brazil, which it uses to feed livestock. The inflationary wave will travel overseas, hitting country after country, and bouncing off to hit another country, in a series of interlaced economic effects.

In the US, this comes during the spring planting window for corn and soybeans. Without fertiliser, there will be reduced planted acreage, lower yields and consequent increases in prices for customers. But the impact will be felt much more broadly than the US. It will be felt in Sri Lanka during the Maha rice harvest, in Bangladesh during the Boro rice season, in India ahead of the Kharif season and in Egypt, Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor countries will suffer the most and they will suffer worse than before, given that the US and the UK have effectively shuttered their government funded aid programmes. The emperor will not care. He will barely recognise the humanity of the people we are discussing. To him, they will be a great dark mass, off in the horizon of the world, an indistinguishable homogenous protrusion without moral purpose or moral consequence. The further impoverishment which is inflicted upon them will not overshadow his mind.

Even if the war ends tomorrow, the pain is coming. The damage has already been inflicted: on extraction, capacity, distribution. It will not be restored in months, it will take years. And in that time we will all suffer, to some extent or other. All because the emperor woke up one morning and decided to start a war.

Liberal democracy rejects leadership personality cults for the same reason it believes in countervailing constitutional restraints. It is because power cannot be trusted. Because power cannot be allowed to persist without supreme vigilance. It cannot be tolerated except insofar as it is pinned down by multiple controls. We have developed this system specifically to prevent madmen becoming leaders and to moderate them if they do.

This is why we have the judiciary, the legislature, the press and the voting public: to hold power to account. This is why each part of the system is scrutinised and moderated by some other part, or multiple parts in tandem.

For a decade now, populists have told us that independent institutions are a threat to the people’s will. That the judges are biased, the legislature is elitist and the press a pack of liars. But if you look around the world today, you can see the full extent of this fiction. It is a lie that killed those children in that school, that will destroy an American start-up before it can get off the ground, that will price a British family out of their weekly shop and will drive people in some of the poorest countries on earth into greater suffering.

We do not serve the people by allowing power to be exercised without restraint. We serve them by taking it firmly under control.

These events are caused by the madness of the emperor. But they are ultimately the result of populism and the dark, blood-dimmed lie it has told the public. They can be brought to a halt, once we call that lie out and commit to the values that our society is based on.

Odds and sods

Best be quick because that was a long one. This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or on Spotify. My column this week was the European far-right having a terrible time due to their connection to Trump. Poor them. We put out a Origin Story release this week on Introvert/Extrovert - is it real, or just some fetishistic way for people to self-categorise? We reveal all, in a story of psychoanalysis, human profiling and super weird Austrian sex stuff. I haven’t watched or read or listened to a goddamn thing, sorry - utter cultural death at the moment - but I’ll be on new and improved form next week, I promise. See you then.