Mark Chaloner

Brilliant! “Trump, the peacemaker.” - Jonathan Pie “Back to you, Sophie. Thank you. It's interesting, isn't it, that Trump signed this deal in Versailles, you know, the location of another famous humiliating, total capitulation. But you know, of course, Trump will spin this as a massive success because he's got form in declaring he's won when clearly he hasn't. But this war was a success in the same way that paying $14 million to have large chunks of blue paint floating in an algae-infested reflecting pool was money well spent. The truth is, the United States has rarely looked weaker, and Iran has rarely looked stronger, having now worked out that if anyone doesn't do exactly what they want them to, they'll just close the Strait of Hormuz, and they've got the whole world by the bullbags. We went from week one: "I will win. Victory will be easier than that time I kidnapped the president of Venezuela." To week two: "I won." To week three: "Why aren't you helping me win?" To week four: "I don't need your help to win, but if you don't help me win, I'm going to destroy NATO." Week five: "If you don't let me win, I'll annihilate an entire civilization." It's quite a feat to give the Iranian regime the moral high ground, but luckily, Donald Trump shattered the illusion of American morality a long time ago. Week six: "We're winning, and to prove it, here's an AI picture of me dressed as Jesus.” Week seven: "The Pope is a soy-filled, woke, Guardian reader." Week eight: "I'm getting bored now." Weeks nine through to 14: "Really bored now, and I've got ballrooms to build and cage fights on the White House lawn to organise." And four months later, victory! Thank you very much, where's my peace prize? And if the rest of the G7 can just clear up the mess and pay the bill, that would be great. The outcome was always inevitable, but you know, it's been fun to watch. Most of Trump's posts on Truth Social around the conflict have sounded less like the leader of the free world and more like a 14-year-old boy who's the only one left in the class not to have fingered anyone. One particular highlight being on Easter Sunday, when Trump went on to Truth Social to write, "Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards." Which are the words of a true diplomat with supreme control of the situation. He then spent some time at the White House Easter Egg Roll, where he gave a speech to a bunch of bemused primary school children about how he's thinking of starting World War III in Iran and Joe Biden's auto-pen. But this conflict hasn't all been plain sailing. Trump got really angry with the UK, and Spain, and Canada, Australia, Italy—in fact, anyone who raised any objections to this gross example of imperial overreach was branded a coward. It was as if he felt like we should all be grateful that his latest piece of American expansionism didn't involve making Canada the 51st state or carpet bombing the sleepy village of Greenland. Perhaps if you want your allies to be good allies, then maybe start treating us like allies. Don't bully your allies, or slam illegal tariffs on your allies, or interfere with their elections by overtly promoting far-right parties across Europe whilst hurling insults at our leaders and threatening to invade Allied sovereign territory, and then demand we come to your aid just because you started a war because one, Benjamin Netanyahu told you to, and two, to distract from the fact that you appear in the Epstein files more times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible. But at least someone did all right out of this whole thing. Well, for me, the highlight of the whole shit show was the $2.1 billion in bets placed minutes before presidential announcements about the war in Iran. 1/2