The taxonomy of global influence—the framework of persuasion and power—is scaffolded by binary behavioural bookends. Nations who wield their influence silently and well, build strength and alliances. Those who wield it with contempt build resentment, engender faultlines within and without. Donald J Trump is weaponising contempt, defining the world order of insults.
Diplomacy is a process for managing mutual interests. Trump is replacing it with a ‘Hellhole Doctrine’. Since his return to the White House, he has deployed systematic verbal assault on nations as an instrument of subjugation. It doesn’t matter to Trump and minders kissing his ring that the authority of the United States is leaking through a sieve of verbal bile.
Every week, the presidential pulpit hosts a parade of ‘Truths’ used to hurl insults. Not long back amid the tariff wars, Trump declared India, with a GDP growing at 7.8 percent, was a “dead economy”. This week, Trump endorsed a rant dubbing India (and China) as “hellholes”. That is rich coming from a regime that notched a record for shutting government for 44 days, and is witness to 63 school shootings in just four months and over 200 drug deaths a day.
Trump’s utterances often reflect the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind—riveted in ignorance, intentionally rude and divorced from facts. His tirades follow a singular pattern: the bully’s mandate of “my way or the highway”. Earlier this month, he issued a chillingly crude ultimatum to Iran: “Open the f*****’ Strait, you crazy b*******, or you’ll be living in hell—just watch!” He also threatened to wipe out the “entire civilisation” of Iran!
Trump wants Canada to be the 51st state, labelling it a “freeloader” and predicting that “China will eat it alive”. He says Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is irrelevant because “the cartels are running Mexico”. Unfettered by niceties, Trump said at the UN that Brazil will do poorly because “it is led by a man who prefers the failed ideologies”, while Lula da Silva was in the room. He has threatened to invade Nato territory Greenland (effectively Denmark) and mocked Norway over the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Wednesday, Trump mimicked UK PM Keir Starmer, calling him “weak and indecisive”, with a poor choice of friends. When Europe declined to join the conflict with Iran, he branded them “cowards”. Even the Vatican is not exempt. He targeted Pope Leo XIV, stating: “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess.” Why? Because the Pope urged an end to wars.
The obsession for domination is explained by Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory. Individuals define and bolster self-identity by running down others, by redefining their own status as higher and better than others. It has been argued that the ‘hellhole’ rhetoric is crafted to uplift the sentiments of a domestic audience anxious about displacement and distress. Maybe so, but there is no question that insults have lasting consequences.
In Trumpistan, nations are cast, publicly and repeatedly, as liabilities, freeloaders or threats—setting the stage for tariffs, coercive deals and unilateral resets. In this reordered script of power, the insult is the opening bid. Unsurprisingly, the world is left wondering if it was witnessing a masterclass in ‘dominance signalling’ or the messy markers of a cognitive collapse.
The question is not whether this is unprecedented—it plainly is. No American president in the modern era has publicly degraded allies, civilisations and partners at this frequency, with this abandon and at this diplomatic cost. The question is: what explains it? Political analysts may see strategy in Trump’s behaviour—including a madman theory spouted by pundits every time Trump is seen as going off the hinge on tariffs, migration or wars.
Nobody quite knows if the madman pitch is strategy or camouflage. Everyone is interpreting the symptoms. Neuropsychologists see it differently from political pundits. Science says that the lack of impulse control and social judgement triggers a condition called disinhibition, which results in inappropriate verbal or physical acts that fail to conform to accepted norms. Very simply, the failure of faculties in the prefrontal cortex makes the person crude, impulsive and remorseless.
Trump is known to burnish language and facts. As George R R Martin writes in The Game of Thrones, “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king.” The repeated use of superlatives about the self illuminates a curious condition. Otto Kernberg’s construct of malignant narcissism holds answers. The Austrian psychoanalyst puts it as the psychosis of a person beset by paradoxes—self-inflation, limitless need for praise and intense envy bubbling behind a façade of confidence.
There is much lather about cognitive questions. Many, including some elected officials, are suddenly reading up and discussing the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution which sets the framework for “presidential disability and succession”. The question and its answers are for the American people to divine and define. The world, meanwhile, is concerned about the consequences of the hellhole doctrine.
The comity of nations is clearly offended and is rewiring alliances and systems. Europe is inducting alternatives to SWIFT for interbank transfers, with the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements reviewing options including SEPA, WISE and Airwallex. France has repatriated its gold out of the US and Germany may follow suit. Trump is now viewed as a toxic asset by Europe’s far right. The US must now contend with Iran along with Russia and China. The US president’s actions have accelerated what his country thwarted for decades—the emergence of a multi-polar world order.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar
Author of The Gated Republic and Accidental India.