Trump Stakes

Reviewing UK coverage of Donald Trump's second inauguration so you don't have to...

Previously: Always too soon
The Daily Mail ropes in a tame academic to take advantage of Tony Slattery's death.

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An example of the worst kind of milquetoast analysis we’ll see during the second Trump era appeared even before he was inaugurated yesterday. Sarah Smith, the BBC’s North America Editor, published the following on the BBC News website:

Will we feel the tectonic plates of power shift beneath our feet as [Trump] re-enters the White House? Can he deliver his pledged sweeping reforms? Will it be as apocalyptic as his opponents suggest?

Listening to some of his detractors, you would be forgiven for thinking the skies will darken and the birds will flee Washington as soon as he takes the oath of office.

Many worry he will try to rule as an autocrat and undermine American democracy. His predecessor, Joe Biden, pointedly used his final Oval Office address to warn of a dangerous oligarchy of unaccountable billionaires forming around Trump that threatens the basic rights and freedoms of Americans.

But no one can deny Trump, 78, has a clear mandate after his decisive election victory in November. He won the popular vote and the electoral college. He won a clean sweep of swing states. His agenda has the green light from voters.

The glib, almost mocking, dismissal of the concerns of Trump’s many critics is bad enough, but that final paragraph wholesale accepts Republican propaganda about his election win. Trump won both the popular and electoral college votes, but the impression of a landslide is false.

Unlike Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Biden in 2020, Trump didn’t win a majority of the vote — 49.7% of the popular vote went to him — and his 1.5% popular vote victory was one of the smallest ever. Across the US, a mere 0.15% of voters led to a second Trump term. Around 90 million people who were eligible to vote didn’t turn out at all; that’s roughly 36% of the electorate. Trump won but not a “clear mandate”.

Accepting the ‘clear mandate’ lie feeds into the idea that Trump should be able to further expand the power of the Presidency. Trump’s second victory was not unprecedented or unique. Far from “no one” being able to deny that Trump “has a clear mandate”, we can and should.

But BBC News, forever fearful of failing to be balanced, is also terrified of being seen as a bunch of the kind of “smug liberals” decried by Sherelle Jacobs in her Telegraph column today. While she hedges her bets, noting the likelihood that the chaos which characterised the first Trump presidency will return and that he “may fail”, Jacobs opens her piece with lofty praise for the inauguration:

That the West is witnessing a paradigm shift was reflected in the serene confidence radiating from Donald Trump during his inauguration.

Scathing rather than sullen in his speech, he forensically demolished the Biden’s administration for its various betrayals and failures. Assured rather than ferocious, he vowed to restore “history’s greatest civilisation” to new heights of success, not least by restoring its manufacturing prowess. True, his speech spangled with his trademark sloganeering – such as his vow to end the Green New Deal and instead “drill baby drill”. But there was also a gravelly poetry to his soliloquy, as he invoked the frontier spirit and even spoke of America pursuing its Manifest Destiny to Mars.

“Gravelly poetry”: what you’d get if you chucked a load of fridge magnets in a cement mixer. Trump is as forensic as a shotgun blast.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph op-ed section, Tim Stanley was sad he didn’t get an invite:

The speech was not only entertaining but the perfect distillation of American conservative ideals. The story of pioneers crossing “deserts” and scaling “mountains”. The appeal to “farmers and soldiers”, ie the common man. And a nod to the colour-blind dream of Martin Luther King. 

“My life was saved for a reason,” Trump said of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Finally, he expressed a belief in “manifest destiny” which will someday extend to planting a flag on Mars – causing Elon to clap happily. That election was money well spent.

I know that as an Englishman I’m supposed to express distaste at this stuff – so much better to have an archbishop crown a king, and then resign later over an abuse scandal – but it all felt like a fun party to which I wasn’t invited. From this side of the Atlantic, we can hear the sound of YMCA and Tiffany Trump popping champagne – while we’re stuck indoors with Keir and Rachel, playing a tedious game of bridge.

“The golden age of America begins right now!” Trump declared. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to hear someone say that about the UK for once? 

That’s the fun party where Elon Musk appeared to make a Nazi salute, not once but twice, in a spectacle that was catnip for the neo-nazis as well as a chance for the Anti-Defamation League to dismiss the performance as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm”. Yes. And Leni Riefenstahl just made some excessive home movies.

Meanwhile, Janet Daly, perhaps watching a version of Trump’s speech broadcast from an alternate reality, concluded that “in the end, it was about unity.” The unity of the right and the far-right, perhaps.

Over in The Times, William Hague worried about Trump’s lack of interest in curbing climate change, dealing with US debt, or regulating crypto but tried to keep on side with the right by daydreaming about potential Trumpian triumphs:

Could the shock of Trump, the painful vulnerability of being exposed to the whims of a president who flaunts his power, shake other western nations out of their complacent decline? Could Nato members decide they have no option but to raise defence spending sharply, as he demands, forcing reforms to the rest of their budgets? Might the EU realise it has to raise its game in competing with the US in new technologies? What if Elon Musk, if he focuses on his new task at Doge (the Department of Government Efficiency), really does find tens of billions of dollars of savings? Could it show the way for other governments to slash the cost of bureaucracy in the dawning age of AI? All of these things could happen, and we could be thanking Trump for them a couple of years from now.

We can all play fun ‘what if?’ games. What if Elon Musk gets into one of his rockets and blasts himself into deep space never to return? What if he suddenly decides to become a Trappist and fucks off to a remote monastery? Either of those is as likely as his pretend department being anything other than a means for him to slurp up even more US government contracts.

In the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson filed a ‘What I did on my holidays’ dispatch from the inauguration designed to emphasise how very close he was to the action:

Never mind whether or not he actually touched that Bible. At 12.01pm Eastern Standard Time, the invisible pulse of power surged from the battered volume into those five frankly normal-sized digits of the right hand of Donald John Trump.

And it happened. Sitting feet away in the rotunda of the Capitol building I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.

I saw the resurrection of the man they despised and reviled – the second inauguration that so many believed was morally, politically, legally, perhaps even biologically, impossible.

In taking that oath – with Melania by his side in her blue boater – Donald Trump became not just the 45th but also the 47th president and completed the most spectacular political comeback of all time.

One can only assume that Johnson’s mind quickly moved to the thought that if Trump could achieve that, surely he could finagle his way back into Number 10 one day. In the meantime, he’ll have to stick to writing this kind of treacly verbiage for an insanely over-inflated pay packet:

All human institutions need a leader, and the world is no exception. For better or worse, America is the leader of our planet, and on the whole things go better when that leadership is strong. That strong leadership is what Trump is evidently determined to give.

Unsurprisingly, Sarah Vine managed to produce an equally ego-centric contribution, turning a brief meeting with Melania Trump at a Buckingham Palace banquet in 2019 into a meditation on what the First Lady is really like:

I introduced myself, and we got chatting. Observing my husband's kilt, we speculated that perhaps next time, her husband, being of Scottish heritage, should also attempt the tartan.

I said how much I liked her dress, and cracked a joke at my own expense, and she laughed, a proper, genuine laugh. She was much funnier and cooler than I had expected, and I realised then that she was no mere arm candy.

A later passage has more than a whiff of projection around it given Vine’s continuing tendency to talk about her former spouse Michael Gove:

I'm not sure she even cares what The Donald thinks of her, as evidenced by a recent interview in which she said: 'Some people, they see me as just the wife of the president, but I'm standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts, I have my own yes and no, I don't always agree with what my husband is saying or doing, and that's OK.'

Compared to the usual trad-wife guff spouted by most political spouses, this is encouraging. Indeed, one might even argue that Trump's 20-year marriage to a woman of such strong character reflects rather well on him.

Meanwhile, Andrew Neil, 75, an old man with a column, says Trump is “an old man in a hurry”. Having noted rather blandly that many of Trump’s proposals “have the ability to provoke turmoil at home and chaos among America's allies”, Neil concludes on the same optimistic note as many of the other right-wing commentators:

… his essential optimism about America is a great asset — and guide. It makes him unique among major democratic leaders. That optimism will be justified if he can focus relentlessly on being the transformative president the country needs.

Times will be turbulent under Trump. But they are also propitious for radical change. The Trump Rollercoaster 2.0 has begun. We are in for a scary ride. Hold on tight. There's a destination ahead that could well be worth the journey.

If we’re on a rollercoaster, I’m lucky that reading all these columns has given me such a strong stomach. Perhaps branded sickbags would make good merch. They’d certainly come in handy when looking at The Sun’s Trump coverage.

In a leader column, the paper said Trump “can be Britain’s best ally — as long as Labour stop their ill-advised outbursts”, essentially arguing that the way to deal with a bully is to laugh along with their jokes. I suppose that’s understandable given who their big boss is… Elsewhere, Harry Cole denies any knowledge of irony to warn against offering a “zinging ‘hot take’ about how dreadful everything is” and argues that Trump might be brilliant.

Donald Trump may yet be a disaster for the Ukrainians. He could drive up prices again with trade wars, or lead the world into a dangerous conflict with China. 

But there is just as much chance that he will not be and — whisper it quietly — he might actually do a good job. We just don’t know yet. 

But writing the history books with the early conclusion of a certain disaster helps no one. Britain has far more to gain from the success of our closest ally — but my goodness, you would not think it from all the whining. 

Nothing says professional political commentator like plonking yourself so thoroughly on the fence that you resemble an overinflated scarecrow.

We’re only on day 2 of Trump Season 2, but let’s come back to these early analyses in December and in four years’ time. I bet they’ll age even worse than Trump does.

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