A comic tyrant

Winston Churchill once said, "The price of greatness is responsibility." Listening to Donald Trump at the United Nations, one could not help but notice how little responsibility accompanied the great power he presides over. Instead, the world was treated to a performance — part swagger, part self-congratulation, part rebuke — a spectacle more suited to a campaign rally than the chamber once imagined as humanity's conscience. Here was not a statesman, but a comic tyrant: a figure who cloaks menace in the garb of ridicule, who trivialises even as he threatens.

His address was less about engaging the world than scolding it. Nations were admonished for not pulling their weight, alliances were belittled, and the very institution that hosted him was mocked as ineffectual. It was the theatre of derision, where power insists on laughing at the weak while demanding their obedience. Trump does not so much lead as he ridicules into submission — and in that sense, his performance embodied not the dignity of empire, but its insecurity.

For decades, American presidents, even when acting in ways many around the world condemned, still paid homage to a language of universal principles. Trump discards the pretence. His is a blunt credo: America first, the rest nowhere. The old mask of leadership — that America bore the burdens of the world — was replaced by a sneer: if you disagree, you are dispensable. What was once called "the free world" is now reduced to a one-man stage, where applause is demanded, not earned.

The heart of the matter, of course, lies in the Middle East. Washington's obsession with elevating Israel into an unchallenged regional gendarme remains unchanged, only now it is expressed without shame. The suffering of Palestinians is dismissed, Gaza's misery ignored, the crimes of occupation rationalised. It is not love for Jews as a people that drives this, but the structural power of an alliance where Israel serves as both partner and proxy.

No American president dares pressure Tel Aviv into abandoning its injustices; to do so would be political suicide. The tyranny lies not only in Israeli policy but in the silence imposed on America's own leaders.

Thus the comic tyrant's act has a darker undertone. The laughter is forced, the ridicule conceals violence. At the UN, the world saw not a vision of cooperation but the cracking of the old order. Institutions that emerged after 1945 — flawed as they were — now face contempt from the very power that midwifed them. Trump may be the most brazen, but he is less a cause than a symptom: America no longer feels obliged to lead by persuasion when it can dictate by derision.

The consequences are profound. A world already fractured — by war in the Middle East, by the collapse of arms control treaties, by the rise of populist nationalism in Europe and Asia — now witnesses the erosion of even rhetorical commitment to multilateralism. For the global South, which once invested hope in the UN as a platform for justice, this mockery is salt on old wounds. For Europe, it is a reminder of dependency. For Asia, it is another signal that power and principle have parted ways.

And if anyone doubted the depths of Trump's disdain, recall his public belittling of London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan — first at a royal banquet in Britain and then again at the UN itself. Such barbs against an elected leader of one of the world's great cities revealed the pettiness beneath the bluster. Now he seems eager to find another adversary in New York's rising political figure Zohran Mamdani, making digs at him even before he is elected Mayor. It tells us all we need to know: this was not leadership on display at the United Nations, but a tantrum — the comic tyrant at his most petty.