I have sometimes wondered whether the idiocy coming from Trump is just part of a clever game he's playing. I'm convinced now that that isn't the case. The man really is thicker than two short bricks glued together. He genuinely is exactly as stupid as he acts. He's a grifter and a con artist and the only thing he has ever been good at in his life is to part even bigger fools and their money and having that money end up in his own pocket. And now even THAT marble is starting to roll out of his reach.

The US government acting as a whole might be marginally smarter than its president. Some of its behaviour may hint at an underlying tactic leveraging its president's behaviour to achieve short sighted gains for the country. Trump's kotowing to Putin has led to a greater commitment of Europe to spend money on defending Ukraine. While the USA will never own Greenland as per Trump's deranged fantasy, by not publicly opposing their president's deranged outbursts about it on social media, the US government has effected a commitment by other NATO countries to start spending more resources on defending the Arctic.

As a short term tactic this sort of behaviour might even work. At this stage we can only see Mark Rutte's ankles and feet, he's crawled that far up Donald J. Trump's hamberder encrusted back passage.

But the long term damage to the USA's reputation on the world stage is already starting to become apparent, and the economic impact has not even started to really hit. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Trump suddenly backpedaled so completely on his tariff threats over Greenland. Perhaps someone in his administration caught Trump during one of his rare lucid moments and explained to him how the tariffs that are already in place are leading to trading partners waking up from decades long complacency and making new deals elsewhere. Maybe someone found a way to actually rein him in.

But the damage is done. The USA's reputation is shot to hell, and I'm not optimistic it can ever be recovered.

If there is any sort of positive to be had from this, let's be smart here in Europe. We are still dealing with far right populism here. Farage. Wilders. AfD. Orbán. Le Pen. Meloni. These people are divisive and bad for Europe, so let's engage in constructive dialogue with our fellow voters and show them how it's in their own interest to vote for someone else. We need to accept that people have different world views. Some are progressive, some are conservative, some lean left, some lean right. In a democracy we are going to have to accept that a large percentage of the electorate will never vote for "our" party, but that populism, any form of populism, is counter productive and damaging. How do we talk to people to convince them of this without playing into the populists' polarising playbook?

That is our challenge for the next decade.