Perhaps it was the imbecilic behaviour of last week’s US Presidential debate moderators, perhaps it was Kamala Harris deciding to be insufferable again – despite fielding soft-ball questions the responses to which she, unlike her opponent, had not fact-checked. Whatever the reason, Donald Trump’s prospects have not been damaged. He may win November yet – and the British are bricking themselves.
They’re bricking themselves because truly awful things might happen. Imagine if Trump bollocks-up a, say, military withdrawal somewhere, prompting the evil curiosity of Vladimir Putin? “Hmm,” Putin might say, “I think I’ll go ahead now, invade Ukraine, then kick back, take a load off as the Europeans impose sanctions upon themselves as punishment.” Hamas, a proscribed terror organisation, may take a similarly bullish view: “Lads,” Yahya Sinwar may say one evening, “that Trump guy is bumbling and useless, most of the time laying prostrate on the sofa whilst his wife chews his ear off about teaching unions. Let’s do this.”
The British are convinced that any one of Trump’s sons may smoke crystal meth in the White House cloakrooms. Being a nation of dog lovers, they’re nervous that he may bring a poorly-trained canine into the Presidential grounds that will attack staff. And the gaffes. Under Trump, the British are certain, people in wheelchairs will be ordered to stand when he encounters them, black people will be told that they’re not really black if they don’t support him, and he’ll behave inappropriately with children and women, sniff hair and shake imaginary hands.
Two ways
For the longest time there were only two ways America existed in Britain’s thoughts. The one is anti-Trump hysteria, and the other was the “I don’t like Trump…but” pearler, sort of like the old “I-have-black-friends” – for libertarians. Now, an increasingly radicalised minority (read: the previously patriotic), are emerging with another thought. They totally want Trump, but more – they’re fantasising about him going on a golfing jolly and handing the executive branch to Marjorie Taylor-Greene for 48 hours, where they hope she’ll kick back with her legs on the Oval Office table, neck 3/4 of a bottle of chardonnay and ponder whether to launch a couple of hellfires at Britain.
Like the former patriots, Marjorie doesn’t fancy the UK much – she’s complained before of having to queue two hours to visit the aquarium, so that’s where she’ll probably aim first – let all the fishes that survive the blast taste the cocaine that seeps from Parliament’s lavatories into the Thames.
As much as that won’t happen, the British media and political establishment are behaving as though it will – so they are going long on Kamala. The Daily Mail, owned by aristocrats, is brazenly supporting a woman once considered the Senate’s most radical member. The Guardian’s support is not just academic, but an act of solidarity: both the newspaper and the Democrat candidate boast links to slavery, so, slay sister or whatever. Daytime television, where callers are screened, is also in on it.
Yesterday Gwendoline from Bognor Regis barked that “Donald Trump is Russian” before descending into a coughing fit that nuked the line. And even worse is The News Agents, Britain’s best-funded and most useless podcast, which claimed that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris equals game-over for Donald Trump. What the podcast’s Emily Maitlis forgot (possibly because she is too unhinged even for the BBC) was that there is a precedent: in 2015, a YouTuber called Owen Jones squealed as a comedian called Russell Brand endorsed the Labour candidate for that year’s UK general election, Ed Miliband. “This is going to change everything,” shrieked Jones. It didn’t.
Projection
This is all, of course, projection, masking something worthier of bricking it: the state of their own country. One minute the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer is jailing the elderly for some choice grade Facebook remarking – the next he’s freezing them to death. His new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has repeatedly lied about the state of the country’s finances en route to the Autumn Statement, and this woman, who speaks with alarming resemblance to Guy Ritchie’s Snatch character Bricktop, will surely finish off any OAP who isn’t already in jail, or the advanced stages of fluid retention.
Job creators are fleeing. What passes for “opposition” here is a hole in the ground (how things got to where they are in the first place). The Judiciary has been captured by stealth and the return of a beefed-up nanny state is imminent, no clearer than in plans to ban smoking in pub beer gardens, or ban fast food advertising on television (the commissars will make a special exception for chicken jalfrezi – I guarantee it). And just this week Ed Miliband – that same Ed Miliband of 2015, now the UK’s Secretary for Climate Change and Net Zero – bemoaned the closing of another oil refinery, all the while having made closing oil refineries a principal feature of his department.
So, the British, with the exception of the former patriots, are doing something famously British – looking away, or more appropriately – further afield, where a more ideal candidate is jostling. Under Starmer and his crew, Kamala appears positively centrist – she even speaks as Barack Obama did in 2008. For them it’s both “hope” and another layer of insulation from their greatest fear – being accused of racism. For everyone else it answers the question: what is the current state of Britain?
You don’t even need to examine the thousands of millionaires gapping it for Dubai or Milan. You don’t need to see the receding tide as evidence of the tax tsunami forming on the horizon. You just need to listen to the hiss of a nation consciously choosing to live vicariously through an electoral choice of another country. That’ll tell you everything.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image by Larry White from Pixabay