Trump, a special president (By Abu Oumar) February 14, 2026
On Facebook, a post from a reputable site reports these words from Donald Trump: “Putin calls me Mr. President. Xi Jinping calls me Mr. President. They are very respectful and they are very cool guys. Only the leaders of Europe call me Donald. They are very rude and disrespectful. » In another world, with a slightly more traditional president, this post would have raised a smile before being classified among the countless fake news which now abound on the web. But we are in the Trump era. And with Trump, the improbable has become routine, excess a norm, excess an official language. Donald Trump is not a president like any other.
He made it a political argument, almost a registered trademark. He cultivates provocation as others take care of their diction. He allows himself verbal discrepancies that a head of state worthy of the name would never have dared to express, much less in public. We saw him mock Emmanuel Macron, mock his NATO allies, treat certain leaders as “weak”, reduce diplomacy to a brutal, almost primary balance of power. We also remember his sentences which have become infamous: calling certain African and Caribbean countries “shithole countries”, suggesting injecting disinfectant to fight against Covid, asserting without batting an eyelid that he could “settle the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours”, declaring that he would “fall in love with Kim Jong-un” or, more recently, taking offense at a possible trade agreement between Canada and China: “If they conclude their agreement, China will take possession of the Canada. And the first thing they will do is end ice hockey! “. So many outings which would once have caused a major institutional crisis, but which today are swallowed up in the continuous flow of its provocations.
Trump not only governs: he performs. It stages power as a permanent spectacle, where the president becomes the main actor, an uncontrollable tribune, a global influencer. It abolishes the boundaries between private speech and state speech, between good words and strategic decisions. The presidential function, once surrounded by an almost sacred solemnity, thus finds itself trivialized, desecrated, sometimes even ridiculed. My friend Bro, faced with this warlike spirit, often says to me with a laugh: “At 81 years old, if the world disappeared under a nuclear bomb, he wouldn’t lose much in the change. » Behind the humor, a real concern: that of seeing humanity suspended from the impulses of an unpredictable man, capable of setting the planet ablaze in a fit of anger or a whim of ego. Because these sentences also reveal a deep need for recognition. Trump wants to be called “Mr. President.” He demands deference, cultivates authority, coats himself in symbols: the flamboyant red tie, the hammered slogans, the white-hot crowds.
As if ostentation had to compensate for an intimate flaw, a complex that is never really appeased. Those who doubt their own greatness often demand that it be proclaimed aloud. I remember a former manager at a company where I served. He had difficulty with his executives calling him by his first name. Only one found favor in his eyes: the one who called him “Boss”. Power, sometimes, does not only seek to be exercised. He demands to be worshipped. And this is perhaps where the most insidious danger lies: when the presidency becomes a narcissistic mirror, when the White House is transformed into a theater stage, when History bends to the moods of a man, it is the very idea of responsibility that falters. The world cannot afford either permanent improvisation or the politics of spectacle. Because we can trivialize the words, never the consequences.
