The column treats Trump’s Sept. 22 UNGA speech as a rejection of international law: a post-midterm choice to “deal or annihilate” Iran, claimed credit for eight wars and “saving” lives in Gaza, the Maduro seizure tied to oil, Caribbean vessel strikes, and two major U.S. bases in Greenland.

It also cites his FTO designation of Mexican cartels, attacks on the Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and the ICC, and a refusal of global AI rules in favor of “Super Intelligence.”

The author’s charge is that allies nodded at the Iran war and that Washington, with like-minded states, is treating law and the UN as optional restraints on power.

There was nothing new in the Reality Television President’s swill filled address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22.  Donald Trump had said much of it before, most of it with wearying derangement and detachment from reality.  There were the bullying threats of annihilation and doomsday relish that never eventuate.  There were the usual flashed credentials, now long worn, of a Cincinnatus briefly brought from plough to war for the state.  “While others have talked, I have acted; while others have spoken of peace, I have made peace.”  There were the stock verbal assaults on outsized, inflated enemies (where are those globalist leftist bureaucrats at the UN? The octopus straddling transgender agenda?); and his return to the cherished idea of the hoax.

The troubling theme of the address lay in its purposeful unmooring of the United States from any semblance of international law and fidelity to international borders.  Regarding Iran, he imperiously thought it his prerogative to make “a big decision”: make a “deal […] that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before […] or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never........

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