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A comic tyrant

27 0
11.10.2025

Winston Churchill once said, "The price of greatness is responsibility." Listening to Donald Trump at the United Nations, one could not help but notice how little responsibility accompanied the great power he presides over. Instead, the world was treated to a performance — part swagger, part self-congratulation, part rebuke — a spectacle more suited to a campaign rally than the chamber once imagined as humanity's conscience. Here was not a statesman, but a comic tyrant: a figure who cloaks menace in the garb of ridicule, who trivialises even as he threatens.

His address was less about engaging the world than scolding it. Nations were admonished for not pulling their weight, alliances were belittled, and the very institution that hosted him was mocked as ineffectual. It was the theatre of derision, where power insists on laughing at the weak while demanding their obedience. Trump does not so much lead as he ridicules into........

© The Express Tribune