A walk on the wild side and a photo that shocked the world

Tensions between the US and Iran had rumbled on ever since Donald Trump’s unwise withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear accord.

The administration had designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a foreign terrorist organisation in April 2019 and blamed Tehran for attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz in May.

But the rift finally threatened to burst into conflict when the Revolutionary Guard shot down a US Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk surveillance drone on 20 June, with General Hossein Salami saying it had “violated Iranian airspace”.

“Iran made a very big mistake!” Trump tweeted, menacingly.

According to The New York Times, he then ordered instant retaliation, only to have second thoughts and pull the plug with less than 10 minutes to spare as planes took off and warships moved into place, ready to strike.

Returning to Twitter to explain the U-turn, the president said his boys had been “cocked and loaded” but that he had changed his mind when a general told him the casualty estimate was around 150, which he concluded was disproportionate to the loss of an unmanned toy, even one that cost $130m.

That number was surely available to him beforehand, so the message was probably an act of face-saving on Trump’s part to conceal a loss of nerve, but a life is a life.

Incredibly, Fox host Tucker Carlson was credited with influencing the climbdown in some quarters by airing a segment on his show attacking the president’s hawkish national security adviser John Bolton as “hungry for war”, which Trump, an avid viewer, must have seen.

Carlson did so on the same evening stablemate Sean Hannity warned Iran: “You’re going to get the living crap bombed out of you.”

Trump was back in Japan a week later for the latest instalment of the G20 in Osaka when the international gaze again turned to the US-Mexico border.

Oscar Ramirez, a 25-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, and Valeria, his infant daughter, were found drowned in the Rio Grande, a picture of them face down in the river sending shockwaves around the world just as one of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach had four years earlier.

The president responded on Twitter by blaming Democrats for “Loopholes and Asylum Laws” and, speaking at the G20, for blocking his access to border wall funding, claiming the father and child would not even have attempted the treacherous crossing had it been built because they would have been discouraged.

His reaction was as callous as expected while the image of the victims further encapsulated the abject cruelty of his “zero tolerance” policies.

The world leaders’ summit was otherwise primarily noteworthy for Trump’s agreeing a temporary truce in his increasingly bitter trade war with China after a bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping, the battle seeing each side slapping tariffs on the other’s export goods since January, largely to the disadvantage of midwestern pork and soybean farmers.

After further pow-wows with everybody from Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s own “Trump of the Tropics”, the president flew to South Korea for one more crack at Kim Jong-un.

In the company of Moon Jae-in, Trump met Kim at the border on 30 June and took an extraordinary step, quite literally, by walking across to the northern side of the Joint Security Area of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, becoming the first American president to do so, a gesture that nevertheless failed to yield definite results.

Back safely on home soil, Trump set about preparing for his quasi-fascistic “Salute to America” military parade in DC to celebrate the Fourth of July, apparently his answer to Bastille Day, which he had been impressed by in Paris in 2017 when attending in the company of Emmanuel Macron.

The populist had envisioned a no-expense-spared tribute to the country’s armed forces, with US navy Blue Angels, a B-2 stealth bomber and F22 raptors soaring over the National Mall and M1 Abrams tanks roaming the streets.

In practice, the 60-tonne tanks were too heavy for the roads so had to be merely “on display” and a thunderstorm broke out, drenching Trump and his spectators, as critics accused him of hijacking Independence Day by turning it into a glorified Maga rally.

What the event really deserves to be remembered for, though, is one of the greatest of all of Trump’s gaffes in office on the topic of the revolutionary war of 1775.

“Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory,” he declaimed from the podium, reading from a teleprompter.

“Took over the airports”? In the 18th century? And didn’t the battle of Fort McHenry take place during the war of 1812?

Twitter was a joy the following morning, awash with revised portraits of Lockheed Lightnings sailing over musket-bearing militiamen at Yorktown.

Memes were also on the president’s mind when he held a “Social Media Summit” at the White House on 11 July, dweeb-wrangling the internet’s right-wing creatives to keep them onside ahead of the following year’s election fight.

That gathering, attended by such ghoulish Magaworld grifters as Charlie Kirk, Ben Garrison and Diamond and Silk, was marked by an unseemly brawl erupting in the Rose Garden between Playboy reporter Brian Karem and ex-West Wing staffer turned alt-right Frasier Crane (plus fish oil supplement salesman) Sebastian Gorka.

Perhaps seeking to impress that same audience, Trump issued one of the most notorious tweets of his presidency three days later, telling the four Democratic congresswomen of “the Squad” to “go back where they came from”, sparking a weeks-long scandal over his refusal to apologise.

One man who took that personally was Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived ex-spokesman, who had suffered similar racially charged slurs as a young Italian-American growing up in New York.

It was that moment, he later said, that turned him against his former employer for good, inspiring his reinvention as one of the most outspoken, articulate and cutting anti-Trump pundits on the market.

Read the full The Trump Review series here