Fury from the fairway

12 August 2017, 20:49 | Updated: 12 August 2017, 20:55

Donald Trump is on holiday from his hectic schedule of visiting his country club in Florida.

For a break, he has decided to spend time in his country club in New Jersey instead.

He took a brief sojourn from cheating at golf to threaten to go to war with two different countries, on two different continents, at the same time.

The leader of Venezuela has irked His Orangeness because of, among other things, a crackdown on the freedom of the press in that South American country.

Trump announced this to the North American press that he has been trying to silence since he started his campaign.

Donny doesn't get irony. Irony better watch out because it is next on his list.

First, he has to deal with Kim Jong-Un, the other finalist in the World's Worst Haircut Contest.

The American presidents before him have treated the ruling Kim family by meeting with them, containing their aggression and making sure that they do not lose face publicly, which might cause them to lash out.

Trump has approached the problem by trying to out-shout them.

He is now locked in an escalating contest to see who is crazier, in which neither can back down without looking weak.

Whatever you would define as diplomacy, this is the opposite.

Sitting around a dining table at his golf club, Trump said he would rain down fire and fury if the North Korean leader "utters one overt threat against the US".

Kim Jong-Un then issued just such a threat, making Trump look like a chump.

The problem is that Trump does not think before he speaks, and he does not pass his thoughts by any supervising grown-ups before saying them out loud.

Having been caught out lying about pretty much everything he has ever uttered, the tendency is not to take him seriously.

How can we believe anything he says when it becomes apparent that he is so vainglorious that he lied about receiving a phone call from the Boy Scouts of America, praising the extended rant he performed in front of them?

The Boy Scouts had to issue a statement saying that they never made any such call.

Who lies about getting praise from boy scouts?

He also lied about having consulted his generals about the ban on transgender personnel serving in the military. His own commanders had to issue guidance that no ban was in place.

The first they had heard of it was seeing his Tweet on the news.

That is the problem with Trump trying to frighten an opposition that knows he did not follow through on his first promise to retaliate to an "overt threat".

The assumption could be made that everything he says can be ignored.

The people around Trump are reportedly ignoring him all the time.

The military, his defence chiefs, the leader of the Republican Party and the Secretary of State have all contradicted him openly.

Indeed, Trump contradicts himself all the time. He changes his mind like the direction of the wind.

Unfortunately, he knows that everyone on Earth is paying close attention to him, and attention is what he craves the most.

China have specifically said that they will stop any American aggression, if they judge the US to have attacked first.

We could slide into nuclear war just because Trump likes to see his face on the TV news.

The rest of the world can barely believe that the stable and consistent party in this spat is Kim Jong-Un.

Truly we live in interesting times.