For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from the president’s first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples of bracing candour are fresher. This week both began and ended with the US president speaking the shocking truth.

At a press conference to celebrate his capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that from now on the US would “run” that country, before moving in the very next breath to Venezuela’s oil. There was no pious talk of democracy, scant mention even of the drug trafficking that earlier served as a pretext for military action. Instead, Trump said out loud what had once been a slogan on leftist placards in protest at past US interventions, admitting that it really was all about the oil. It was as transparent a revelation of Trump’s true motive as you could have asked for.

As the week closed, there was another disarmingly frank disclosure from the president, a confession that makes sense of both the crazy start to 2026 – and the man who is increasingly shaping our world.

Before we get to that statement, it’s worth registering how hard it can be to square these flashes of Trumpian honesty with the stream of untruths and, more subtly, contradictions and hypocrisies that emanate from him the rest of the time. Note, for example, Trump’s response when asked for his new year resolution: “Peace. Peace on Earth,” he said. Two days later, he was raining lethal fire on Caracas – and a few days after that, he was defending a US federal agent who had shot dead a mother of three in Minneapolis, a woman who posed no conceivable threat to anyone. The self-styled President of Peace is the bringer of war at home and abroad.

These two fronts are more alike than they........

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