This being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans can recall the king their revolution deposed: the hapless George III. But perhaps they should be shifting their thoughts 12 years forward from 1776 to 1788, when George went mad.
Fanny Burney, the novelist and lady-in-waiting to the queen, came across him unexpectedly one evening in October. He spoke to her in “a manner so uncommon that a high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence, rather – it startled me inexpressibly.”
Over the coming weeks poor George got worse. He talked in a rapid and endless stream of consciousness, at one point going on “for nineteen hours with scarce any intermission”. He made obscene proposals to ladies-in-waiting.
According to the historian Christopher Hibbert, George “gave orders to persons who did not exist; he fancied London was flooded and commanded his yacht to go there immediately; he persuaded himself he could see Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; he composed despatches to foreign courts on imaginary causes; he lavished honours on all who approached him, ‘elevating to the highest dignity . . . any occasional attendant’. He had to be forced to have a bath and, after refusing to be shaved for a fortnight, he allowed the barber to attend to one side of his face but not the other.”
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Before his demented expletive-laden Easter Sunday post, Donald Trump gave a televised address to explain to the nation and the world why he launched and is continuing to prosecute a war on Iran. He said both that “we totally obliterated [Iran’s] nuclear sites” last June and that by February, Iran was “right at the doorstep” not just of possessing a nuclear weapon but of having “a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before”.
A nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before is presumably some kind of fantastically destructive new technology. The Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars? The Daleks’ weapons “that could crack this planet like an egg”. The Vogon Constructor Fleet that demolishes the Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Or, perhaps more aptly, the Soviet doomsday machine in Dr Strangelove?
But this is an actual US president explaining an actual war to his own citizens in what is supposed to be a democracy. What he is telling them is that Iran went from having no physical nuclear programme left at all to being on the cusp of deploying an unprecedented nuclear weapon. It did this apparently in something like six months. This would be one of the most astonishing technological achievements in all of human history.
But Trump wasn’t lying. A lie in this context is something like the claims, in the build-up to the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could launch at London at 45 minutes’ notice. This was an outrageous deception but it was rational – it was intended to be believed and to prepare citizens for the necessity of war.
Trump’s claim that Iran was about to create a new kind of nuclear weapon is nothing like that. It is not intended to be believed – if it were, he would have produced some “evidence” and given some hint as to what this weapon was. And of course, he was not preparing the public for war – he was retrofitting a rationale for a war that had been going on for more than a month.
So this is not lying – it’s prattle. And this is what is so terrifying: the liar has a sense of purpose while the prattler has none. Which is fine if the person who is spouting random gibberish is an unfortunate vagrant on the streets who hasn’t been given his meds. But very much not fine when that person has control of a vast military machine (including a huge nuclear arsenal) and has so successfully surrounded himself with sycophants – “elevating to the highest dignity” passing attendants from Fox News – that there is no one left to stop him using it.
In the same address, Trump announced that America had “no inflation”; that the new regime he claims to have created in Iran is “less radical and much more reasonable”; that “there would have been no Middle East” if he had not torn up the nuclear deal with Iran during his first term; that his attack on Venezuela is “respected by everyone all over the world” and that the Strait of Hormuz will “open up naturally. It will just open up naturally.”
All of this is prattle. It is not even wrong, for to rise to the level of wrongness it would have to posit some relationship between words and realities. Trump isn’t making this stuff up – it’s making him up. The disordered words that come out of his mouth are creating his world. The terror is that it’s a world we all have to live (or die) in.
In 1788, the British court at least recognised they were dealing with a mad king. The endless prattle, the lapses into obscenity, the lavishing of high offices on grossly unqualified people, the increasingly strange manner of speaking, the issuing of unenforceable commands – even in the primitive state of 18th-century psychiatry these were unmistakable signs of derangement. As, of course, were the king’s composing of “despatches to foreign courts on imaginary causes”: a perfect description of Trump’s demands that European states come to his aid in a war whose cause he explains with imaginary weapons.
If this were a historical pageant, it would be quite touching. How nice of the US to re-enact the agonies of the king they disposed of 250 years ago. But to complete the re-enactment they might also recall that even in the sycophantic atmosphere of a royal court, officials felt compelled to act. Eventually poor George was physically restrained. His “mad doctor” tied him up in a chair that George called his “coronation chair”. How long before the US sees a similar act of dethronement?
