Trump is cashing in on his allies while he still has time

We’ve heard a lot over the past few weeks and, indeed, for about a decade on and off about how so much of the coverage of Donald Trump in the mainstream media (that’s me) is biased, unbalanced, and suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Well, the man can be maddening in all manner of ways but, as ever, I'd love to offer a balanced assessment of his peace plan for Ukraine so far as we understand it, and his motivations.

Despite the angry rants he sometimes indulges in, and a taste for extrajudicial execution of America's "enemies", I think Trump is sincere in wanting an end to all sorts of wars, and not just to get his hands on the Nobel Peace Prize to outdo some of his predecessors (the risible Fifa peace prize he was recently awarded being a pitiful, Poundland version of the real, noble thing). When he talks with some force about the thousands of lives lost every week in the vicious conflict, he probably means it, though he invariably fails to mention who started it and occasionally, grotesquely, blames Volodymyr Zelensky.

It also seems fairly obvious that Trump really does want that Nobel prize, if only because it feeds his vanity. The medal would look grand on the mantelpiece in the Oval Office, albeit competing with many other golden goblets and baubles. It seems that gongs matter disproportionately to Trump, and if they incentivise him to stop the killing, then there's no harm in that. Quite the opposite.