There was nothing new in the Reality Television President’s swill-filled address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22. Donald Trump had said much of it before, most of it with wearying derangement and detachment from reality.

There were the bullying threats of annihilation and doomsday relish that never eventuate. There were the usual flashed credentials, now long worn, of a Cincinnatus briefly brought from plough to war for the state. “While others have talked, I have acted; while others have spoken of peace, I have made peace.” There were the stock verbal assaults on outsized, inflated enemies (where are those globalist leftist bureaucrats at the UN? The octopus straddling transgender agenda?); and his return to the cherished idea of the hoax.

The troubling theme of the address lay in its purposeful unmooring of the United States from any semblance of international law and fidelity to international borders. Regarding Iran, he imperiously thought it his prerogative to make “a big decision”: make a “deal…that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before…or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.” Such a decision towards fostering prosperity or encouraging genocide, however, would have to be wait. “I believe we will make a deal right after the [mid-term] elections.” Here was Trump speaking from a position of strategic defeat in his illegal war against Tehran.

In bountiful self-praise, he claimed to have settled eight wars, many having been enduring till his soiling presence graced the globe. Despite the catastrophic leveling of Gaza and Israeli ruminations on ethnically cleansing the Strip of its Palestinian residents, Trump spoke of having saved “untold thousands of lives.” On the war in Ukraine, peace would come (when?), a point he has been making since running as a presidential candidate. With buccaneering relish, he celebrated the violation of international law by suggesting he had arrested (read: abducted) an “outlaw dictator” in the form of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, merely a prelude to gaining access to the country’s oil reserves under the guidance of a friendlier regime. The U.S. would “no longer permit threats to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere – and if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might.”

His poorly camouflaged inner thug was again on show regarding Washington’s Cuba policy, painted by this administration as having an insidious hold on “the Communist Party USA, Antifa, and the Dumocrat Socialists of America. Communism will never be coming to America – but freedom will be coming to Cuba.” In also promising “safety and security” for Mexico, an ominous pledge for a country described as “the epicentre of cartel violence,” Trump thought himself rather clever in designating drug cartels in the country as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” These cartels were “the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere – not good people.” The nonsensical, ineffective, and illegal campaign against alleged narco-vessels in the Caribbean Sea was promoted as having destroyed “97% of the drugs coming into [sic] the ocean and sea.”

On his agreement with Greenland and Denmark, brought about through threats, intimidation and schoolyard bullying, Trump the great peacemaker could extol the virtues of militarisation. The U.S. would “immediately begin the process of developing a large military presence” at designated locations, including “two very major military bases.”

Human rights was another field worthy of grumbling. Human rights officials from the UN had been critical of U.S. policies “protecting children from transgender mutilization [sic] and transgender insanity and enforcing our immigration laws.” Those “craven hypocrites of the Human Rights Council” had little to say when it came to “the persecution of Christians…or the crimes of the world’s most repressive regimes.” Bodies such as UNESCO were encouraging “mass migration” – now that’s a surprise – a globalist program that was “actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in history.” At this point, the mind had truly taken flight.

In addition to execrating various representative institutions of international law in the UN itself, Trump also reserved a salvo for the International Criminal Court, an institution apparently “full of evil people.” Withdraw, he urged member states, from this rogue outfit.

Keeping in step with the modishness of it all, there were also words of lavish praise for the strides being undertaken in the field of artificial intelligence. But even here, this imperial magistrate had complaints. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake.” Regulating it would be eschewed, those doomsdayers about its ills being progenitors of yet another hoax. “The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now – hereinafter officially called ‘Super Intelligence.’”

What remains stunning in his puerile prattling is the extent to which they are tolerated by the allies, whose leaders continue to remain complicit despite sniggering and chortling behind closed doors about a dysfunctional relationship with Washington. The attack on Iran was illegal in international law yet essentially given the nod of approval from the European Commission, most European states, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The murder of its leadership, however cruel, brutal and scheming, did not draw gasps at the grotesque violations of sovereignty but sighs of relief: with these top mullahs dead, maybe the Iranians might do the sensible thing and overthrow the theocracy and its fanatical defenders, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They did not, and conflict that continues to burn and cause mayhem has been the result.

Perhaps most of all – and here, Trump is not unique – is that international law is a body of work to be battered and belched upon, with international institutions such as the UN irrelevant to the exercise of power by countries caring less about informed restraint than the promotion of naked, unadorned self-interest. Where relevant, international customary law should advance, not limit, the power of the state. Trump’s America, in league with other like-minded nation-states, have decided to trash the order and soil the sanctum.