There is no logical explanation for Trump’s behaviour – removing him from office is all that matters

A man capable of tossing his country’s Kurdish allies on to the bonfire of his demented vanities must be reckoned capable of anything

Before we turn to the latest from the medieval bedlam moonlighting as the West Wing, a preemptive caution against hyperbole.

In the early hours of 9 November 2016, tens of millions assumed that Trump would by this date have incinerated most of the planet. Within minutes of the result being called, “How do you get a New Zealand passport?” became a fashionable Google search.

The mild relief that the meshuggenah-in-chief has yet to wage nuclear war behoves us to rein in the doomy superlatives about the torrent of military-related dementia gushing from his every orifice this week.

But my oh bleedin’ Aunt Ada, what fresh pinnacles of Mount Doolally is the tangerine kraken scaling now? Hot on the scorching heels of his self-impeaching public plea to China to help him smear the Family Biden, he is withdrawing US troops from northeast Syria – leaving the Kurdish fighters who have fought Isis on America’s behalf to the tender mercies of Turkey’s President Erdogan, and freeing Vladimir Putin to extend his influence there.

When this news was met with shock even from segments of the fan base, he responded with a threat. He would, so he tautologically tweeted, “destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if Erdogan accepted his kind invitation to invade Syria.

Even some of the colon-dwelling amoebae formally known as congressional Republicans were openly horrified. If they expected the cork to be reinserted in the bottle of Chateau Cray-Cray, their optimism was short lived.

Within hours there emerged a letter from a senior Democrat reporting that Trump intends to raise the lunacy bar another notch. He plans to withdraw from the Open Skies treaty which enables the US and its allies to monitor Russian military activities throughout Europe, most pertinently in Ukraine.

This decision seems far too lavish a present to Putin to be explained by any previous theorising about the contents of the Kremlin safe.

If the pee-pee tapes are little more than the amuse bouche in the blackmail banquet, you wonder with nausea what the entree could possibly be.

What Erdogan might have on Trump is a comparatively trivial matter. A photo of Donald and Ivanka posing with Erdogan in 2012, upon the opening of a Trump hotel in Turkey, has seeped into social media. While one might suspect some accounting peculiarities in that construction project, as evidence it is too circumstantial to be worth much.

What’s known for sure is that last week, towards the end of a call about unrelated matters, Erdogan casually dropped in the request that Trump pull the troops out of Syria.

But however repugnant the betrayal of the Kurds, pulling out of the Open Skies treaty represents a massive ratcheting of the threat to the world order.

Any lingering claims America has to be the leader of the free world would evaporate. It would spell the end of Nato – or at the very least its suspension in cryogenic stasis.

So what, if anything, can Trump be thinking?

Is he flirting with feeding Ukraine to the Russian wolf to punish its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for failing to lend credibility to the debunked conspiracy theory about Joe and Hunter Biden? Is it an inducement to Zelensky to get working on digging the imaginary dirt now?

Or is he the victim rather than the perpetrator of a mafia shake-down? Did Moscow, fearing impeachment, put the frighteners on him to pay off Putin in full while there’s time?

Maybe Alex Jones of Infowars told him that marine biologists in Kiev are developing a new breed of amphibious flying killer shark fitted with radar-defying stealth-jet technology.

It could be something else, or nothing at all.

Attempting logical engagement with a massively diseased mind verges on an act of lunacy itself. In all his great and unmatched wisdom, he is now so maniacally unhinged that removing him before he does damage beyond repair is all that matters.

It has been a while since there was serious talk about prising him from office on unfitness grounds, and it will be a while yet. Activating the 25th amendment relies on the willingness of the vice president, and Mike Pence’s apparent collusion in the impeachable offence makes it unthinkable.

This Don, like any other capo di tutti capi, deploys mutual incrimination as a lethal weapon to enforce his made men’s loyalty.

The fealty of the Republican senators who will vote on impeachment is another matter. Until now, it’s been taken for granted that only when Trump is deemed a liability to their re-election chances will the invertebrates turn.

But in the last 24 hours, there has been a trickle of mutinous public hints about their hitherto private judgement concerning the mental state of President Cuckoo Bananas von Bonespurs.

A man capable of tossing his country’s Kurdish allies on to the bonfire of his demented vanities, let alone contemplating gifting Ukraine to his Russian controllers, must be reckoned capable of anything. And anything, as the word implies, means literally any thing.

In Nixon’s last days, those who served at his pleasure were petrified by what he might do for his swansong as possessor of the codes.

Unstable and paranoid as Nixon was, never in a billion light years would he have blatantly exposed himself as the asset of a hostile power.

If these senators still find the siren call of duty resistible, perhaps it would focus their minds if New Zealand’s prime minister issued a declaration that no one who votes against impeaching Donald Trump will ever be given a passport.