While Paul Kelly has written wisely about Donald Trump, many of his Murdoch colleagues appear discombobulated by the real estate developer’s return to the US presidency. Who can blame them? They’re not alone.

As a conservative, if a wildly radical one, Trump might reasonably expect a fair welcome at News Corp, the awkwardness of his amorality, selfishness, cruelty and incompetence notwithstanding. Yet, it’s unlikely Trump has ever been a comfortable bed-fellow for anyone and in the Murdoch chambers he appears to be causing delusions in some of its denizens.

Greg Sheridan, whose reputation for self-restraint and sound judgment is more modest than many, may be suffering from Trump Disorientation Syndrome.

His recent article in The Australian newspaper titled “The good, the bad and the ugly of Trump’s Middle East tour” shows troubling symptoms. In it, the author has two bob each way on just about everything, ending up in a morass of non-sequiturs sufficient to leave even patient readers gasping for breath.

Sheridan says Trump’s recent “tour of the Middle East may yet go down as one of the most significant and productive interventions by an American president in the troubled region’s history” or “it may deflate into more or less a nothing burger.” Well, that would seem, however unhelpfully, to approximately cover the full range of possibilities.

Sheridan leads with his jaw in claiming that, “The challenge for any........

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