As I sat with my morning tea on Wednesday, going through a news report in The Indian Express of September 23, I became physically sick imagining the fraught arrogance of Donald Trump — the modern Nero, who goes about shamelessly breaking every tenet of decency and human coexistence. There, in black and white, was the President of the United States standing before the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly — an institution born from the ashes of a world war, built so that no man would ever again hurl humanity into fire — calmly telling the assembled nations he faced a “big decision”: whether to make a deal with Iran, or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.”

Read that sentence again. Not as a news consumer numbed by a decade of excess, but as a human being. The elected magistrate of a republic, designed by its founders to be the antithesis of monarchy, stood before the world and announced that the lives of ninety million Iranians — mothers, schoolchildren, poets — rested upon his private deliberation, as casually as an emperor of Rome weighing whether to spare a vanquished province. This is not leadership. This is sovereignty in its oldest and ugliest sense — the divine right of kings dressed in a red tie.

The American presidency was conceived as the deliberate negation of everything Trump embodies. John Locke, whose philosophy runs through the founding documents, held that political authority is a trust held on loan from the governed — revocable, conditional, never a property. Yet listen to the grammar of this week’s speech. Not we, not the Congress, not the American people deliberating through their institutions. “I have a big decision to make.” “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic?” The first-person singular, wielded over the fate of nations. The........

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