As tensions with Iran escalate, President Donald Trump’s behavior last weekend appeared “chaotic” and “odd,” The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt noted on Sunday, citing an expert who offered a possible explanation for the president’s “rash behaviors.”
While the Trump administration’s ongoing and widening war against Iran continues to rattle global stability and send “tremors” through the world economy, Trump’s conduct last weekend, Gabbatt argued, appeared strikingly out of step with the gravity of the moment, and to such an extent that it “defied norms and raised eyebrows over his state of mind.”
“Take last Sunday, for example: the Pentagon solemnly announced that a seventh US service member had been killed in the Iran conflict,” Gabbatt wrote. “Trump spent the day playing golf in Florida, where he appeared to be wearing the same baseball cap he wore during a dignified transfer ritual of dead military members on Saturday.”
That same day, Trump hosted a summit in Florida where he spoke at length about the Spanish language, praising himself on his ability to gauge the quality of English-Spanish interpreters despite not speaking the language, and telling Latin American leaders “I’m not learning your damn language.”
“Trump’s odd weekend came after he had posted eight separate times on Friday about how he had fallen out with Bill Maher, the American TV host and comedian,” Gabbatt wrote. “Maher has no connection to the war in Iran.”
The possible explanation for Trump’s behavior, Emmitt Riley III, a political professor at the University of the South, theorized, was a simple one.
“The president has always exemplified these rash behaviors, but I think he sometimes uses that strategically,” Riley told The Guardian in its analysis Sunday.
“But the other element of this is the president is older, and all of the critiques that he leveled against Joe Biden’s age appear to be impacting him now: we’re seeing him falling asleep in cabinet meetings, we’re seeing him be temperamental.”
It was also Trump’s enormous personal wealth, Riley argued, that may explain his “odd” behaviors amid global chaos.
“How do we expect a person who is a billionaire to actually be concerned about the wellbeing of people who are not of wealth, who are not of that particular economic class?” she told The Guardian. “And I think Trump’s behavior shows either he’s a narcissist, or he just simply doesn’t care.”