Bush

Telegraph Hello and welcome the fuck back Helen Lewis Can't really be you dressed me in such rude terms It's very nice to see you Hannah and very nice to be back So here we are The only two same people left in the world I sent you a message A couple of maybe a month ago and said come on and talk about how everyone's lost their minds I said said, I can't do it this week, but no, don't worry, people will not have regained their minds. Within the next few weeks, I'm confident. Oh, my God, I can't. I've just been telling you, I've got loads of stuff going on in my own life that I'm worried about. And yet this weekend, right in the back of my mind, I was thinking, why am I worried about the future when we all might die in a firing explosion at any

moment? Which I know it was being melodramatic, but at the same point, I feel like we are in a new

frontier of madness somehow. I think Trump is incredibly disinhibited now.

Like I had the same experience.

Maybe you had it.

I read that first, his true social post on Easter Sunday, the one that says,

open up the fucking straight, crazy bastards.

And I thought, well, that can't be real.

Like, obviously, that's not a real post from the US president.

Benz with, like, praise be to Allah. It was, I mean, it really covered a range of tonal registers. So, you know, you have this thing where you just, you have to go and then check, like, has someone reported this? Is this, like, really on the thing? And then there was a situation in the week where Anthropic, one of the AI companies, released a version of a new update of Claude called Claude Mythos. And they said, well, we're not going to release this into the wild because it actually can find an enormous number of security exploits in people's programming systems and it would be simply too dangerous. Fair enough, you have to factor in that the AI companies do think that, you know, doom mongering is a great marketing technique for them.

But equally well, I was a bit like, not now, AI companies.

I can only deal with worrying about one potential meltdown of the world at a time.

You're just going to have to take a ticket and get in line.

Absolutely. I saw William Dalrymple, noted historian.

William Dalrymple retweet that. And Mary Bitt, noted historian Mary Bid underneath say, oh William, I think you've been had. And then the next thing was, oh my God, it's real. I know. And you're like, Mary, come on, you do Roman history. You've seen Collegular. You know about Nero. Like, you know, yeah. This is what happens when people get unchecked power and no one around them will tell them no. And actually, the other thing that happened to both Roman emperors and seems to be happening to Trump is that they begin to see themselves as some kind of instrument of divine justice. Never a good sign. It reminds me of back in the day when cheap holidays to Eastern European cities became a thing,

you'd find yourself getting on a plane and somewhere on that plane would be a stag party.

And you would just bump into them repeatedly during your weekend in Prague or Bratislava or wherever you were.

And every time you bumped into them, they were somehow worse than the last time you'd seen them.

And I kind of feel like that every time I turn the news on at the minute.

They're actually at the point now in the White House where they're all hugging each other

and saying, I love you, mate.

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