Long before he was president of the United States, Donald Trump was a caricature. Producer Mark Burnett approached him to be the lynchpin of The Apprentice precisely because he was a cartoonishly bombastic, ‘greed is good’ era figure addicted to displays of gold-plated opulence. Since occupying the White House, Trump has also frequently acted as a stereotypical American who sees everything as an achievement of the US of A, salvator mundi. And he has been doing it again with the war in Afghanistan.

‘We will always be there for Nato, even if they won’t be there for us,’ he blurted on his Truth Social platform earlier this month. It was manifest nonsense of course, given that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, dealing with collective security, has only been invoked once, on behalf of the United States after the 11 September 2001 al-Qa’eda attacks on New York and Washington. Then, on Thursday, speaking to Fox News, he produced some trademark alternative facts.

‘We’ve never needed them,’ he said of America’s Nato allies. ‘We have never really asked anything of them. They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.’

This is either a display of the President’s ignorance – which is often proudly profound, as if knowledge were a decadent disease – or, just as........

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