Sometimes the moment comes to do the right thing, even when that amounts to an act of self-harm
Donald Trump (Image: MANDEL NGAN, AFP via Getty Images)
As Donald Trump ramps up his Goodfellas schtick, a wise-guy who regards the entire planet as his own Little Italy to menace and extort, the world must confront a truth as self-evident as the snow blanketing Greenland.
The pathetic, subservient diplomatic charade that informs our leaders’ 24/7 tactic of meekly bending the knee to a bullying thug has been an embarrassing failure, a cringeworthy policy that really ought to be sent to sleep with the fishes.
Enough of indulging Trump’s infantile tantrums and shameless coercion.
No more kissing presidential ass even as he offers supposed friends nothing in return other than punitive tariffs and lascivious land grabs.
Let’s call time on the practice of offering Trump standing ovations and ceaseless flattery even though his return gift is a metaphorical two fingers at any notions of international cooperation and shared rules.
US President Donald Trump reacts at the “Board of Peace” meeting during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 22, 2026. US President Donald Trump will show off his new “Board of Peace” at Davos on January 22, 2026 burnishing his claim to be a peacemaker a day after backing off his own threats against Greenland. Originally meant to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza after the war between Hamas and Israel, the board’s charter does not limit its role to the Strip, and has sparked concerns that Trump wants it to rival the United Nations. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)(Image: )
Roll the credits on a time-expired movie, the one presenting the kidology that rock star adulation will raise any kind of handbrake to slow down Trump’s runaway avarice, or that kow-towing before him will dilute his dim-witted, destructive narcissism.
Let’s stop tiptoeing around a tyrant and resurrect a little self-respect.
In between his demented Truth Social posts and rambling, incoherent speeches, Trump – along with his obnoxious inner-circle – is sneering scornfully at the masochistic servility of those at whom he continually thumbs his nose.
Ursula von der Leyen scarcely stopped short of sending thank-you flowers as a reward for American betrayal after the EU shamefully folded when the White House emperor aimed his tariff bazooka at Brussels last summer.
This is a President drunk on might-is-right moonshine.
U.S. President Donald Trump gives a speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.(Image: 2026 Getty Images)
A man sufficiently deluded to whine about being overlooked for a Nobel Prize while openly demanding an ally’s territory, and hyperventilating like an excited toddler about the efficacy of bombs he is dropping in defiance of international law.
Divorced from the real world, he can announce himself as a man of peace while rewinding his country to a Civil War precipice, and championing his law enforcement and ICE agents even as they shoot American mothers of three in the face.
At a hinge moment for the planet, many find themselves harbouring a fantasy where some international figure strikes back with an unedited, high-calibre verbal volley against the browbeating playground mouthpiece.
A moment where, instead of again abasing him or herself, a national leader – maybe of Denmark, given they have good reason, or Canada, as their man, Mark Carney, refuses to lie defeated against the ropes and take the Trumpian punches – actually rises to the moment, looks this international gangster in the face and speaks up for the world’s impotent billions.
Summoning their inner Logan Roy, they effectively tell the Oval Office ogre to “F*** off.”
It might not amount to grown-up behaviour, the risk of crippling repercussions, having dented such a fragile ego, would certainly be severe, but still…
For what remains of the civilised world, there would at least be one or two blissful moments of restored self-respect.
As a viscerally uplifting boost for the soul, it might even prove the equal of that moment Troy Parrott put the ball in the Hungarian net for the third time on a wild November Sunday in Budapest.
Silencing opponents by fostering a climate of fear – through a notion that the punishment for anybody who speaks up against the regime will be swift and severe – is a favourite move in the playbook of despot authoritarians.
What is clear is that a year in painfully submissive mode, a trembling world whispering sweet-nothings in the ear of America’s capricious 47th President and first would-be dictator, while he grows ever more unhinged and hostile, has hardly worked out.
Trumpian vandalism, his monarchical vanity, has left the world thrashing about in the dim and receding light of old norms.
As the planet teeters on the brink, our political invertebrates are required to urgently grow a backbone, to absorb important lessons of history.
Trump has shown he is divorced from the real world(Image: Getty Images)
The ones from the months before World War Two that announce the perils of indulging a covetous autocrat with flattery, restraint, appeasement and Mister Nice Guy diplomacy, even as he goes about rupturing the rules based order.
Brooklyn Beckham hardly brings the wisdom or moral authority of a Jedi Knight to the arena. An indulged nepo baby, his life defined by vacuousness, he offers nothing resembling a template for attaining global harmony.
The 26-year-old husband to a billionaire’s daughter, he is neither philosopher nor Father of the Nation, not Aristotle nor Gandhi.
Yet, there was something refreshing this week, even inspiring, about his refusal to spend another moment of his life smiling for the cameras and playing along with a happy family pretence.
Instead he chose to speak truth (or a version of same) to power, in this case the ultra-controlling celebrity behemoths, his parents, David and Victoria Beckham.
World politics is, of course, infinitely more serious and complex than the accelerated egos of social highfliers smashing against each other in the Hadron Collider of a VIP family dispute.
Donald Trump (Image: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
As Micheál Martin reminds us, the economic consequences of calling out Trump are real and terrifying and potentially devastating for small open economies like Ireland’s, where American jobs put bread on hundreds of thousands of tables.
The Donald is a vengeful man, even imaginary grudges propelling him to acts of pointless cruelty.
So, on many occasions, the sober, Machiavellian pathway is to swallow pride and adopt a posture that is careful, practical and unlikely to open any wounds.
If that is entirely understandable in fraught times, it is becoming increasingly unsustainable as Trump’s behaviour grows ever more belligerent and outrageous.
Sometimes the moment comes to do the right thing, even when that amounts to an act of self-harm.
Though the invite was issued in the service of pragmatic politics, still, Martin rolling out the green carpet, hoping Trump might again visit these shores for a golfing holiday (to this year’s Irish Open, slated for his own Doonbeg links or the 2027 Ryder Cup), felt like an affront to decency.
Donald Trump playing around of golf on the Doonbeg course during his visit into Ireland(Image: )
Such fawning by politicians was described on Wednesday by the former US National Intelligence Officer for Europe, Christopher S Chivvis as a “recipe for perpetual vassalage.”
There is growing awareness of the consequences of what the Canadian PM, Carney, in a powerful Davos speech that amounted to wake-up call to much of Europe, called “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination [to Trump].”
Or, in layman’s terms, sycophantically grovelling before this appalling creature even as his warped views of a dystopian new world order harden like abused arteries.
How can we continue with the fiction that Trump is somehow amenable to reason as he drops dark threats upon America’s abandoned allies like they were the deadly payload of a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber?
READ MORE: Donald Trump and Air Force One touch down in Ireland 24 hours after Doonbeg security alert
Or, while he walks into the twisted embrace of racist white supremacist teachings – delighting his brother tyrant Vladimir Putin in the process – in dismissing Western Europe as a series of failed and overrun states.
Some of the obsequious bootlicking has been unbearable.
Like the NATO chief Mark Rutte mortifyingly addressing Trump as “Daddy” even as the latter, his sub-simian brain a hothouse where ignorance and recrimination flowers, actively seeks to demolish an organisation that has long acted as a firewall against WW3.
Or, Keir Starmer cravenly bowing and scraping before his American counterpart, laying on the royal treatment at Trump’s unprecedented second state visit to Britain last September, a study in abjection complete with a carriage procession around Windsor Castle in ornate golden coaches for the self-styled King of the World.
Trump announced he had reached agreement with NATO’s leader on a “framework of a future deal” concerning Arctic security(Image: AP)
Politicians are slowly recognising the truth about Trump’s diabolical vision.
The Greenland controversy this week prompted Carney, Emmanuel Macron, even Starmer, the latter among the most colourless, dull and insubstantial figures ever to enter the House of Commons, to finally, if still too gently, press the outrage button.
As Eurosceptic Trump threatened to bring down the pillars of international order, a German minister talked about a red line being crossed
Maybe the EU is waking up to the fact that it is a trading block of 450 million people, substantially more populous than the United States.
It is time for that organisation to stop behaving like it is a Division Four football minnow tasked with the impossible odds of confronting David Clifford and Kerry.
As Europe found a little of its voice this week, the bully took a backward step. Trump withdrew his threat to invade Greenland and postponed tariffs he had threatened to impose at the start of February.
It all brought to mind another golden lesson in realpolitik from Succession’s fearsome and unbending patriarch Logan Roy.
The one that argues against worthless display of niceties, insisting instead that life in the halls of power amounts to “a fight for a knife in the mud.”
Faced with an existential threat, European leaders are obliged to get down on their knees and wrestle furiously for the metaphorical dagger.
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