ANYONE wanting to unpick and examine the threads which bind together the complex character of Donald Trump would do well to remember his earlier iteration as a TV guy. You don’t succeed in that world without a talent for visualisation and – just as important – casting.
In the last fortnight he has been the executive producer for two shows. In one of these President Zelensky was given the role of fall guy; in the other the Congressional Democrats cast themselves as the villains of the piece.
President 47 tipped the wink himself the other week (Trump says nothing by accident). ‘This is going to be great television’ was how he chose to sum up that Oval Office exercise in eccentric diplomacy. He got that right.
The Zelensky shakedown was foreign policy meets Jerry Springer. Predictably and synthetically horrified were the usual defenders of ‘the way these things have always been done’ who are so very much in favour of transparency, so long as it takes place in private. Those of us who were not weaned on the mannerisms and grammar of the diplomatic language game are not qualified, in their view, to be exposed to such vulgarity. We can’t handle the truth.
Granted it was all a bit much for the editorial team at the Spectator which concluded that the ‘White House bust-up was a spectacle from which one wished to avert one’s eyes’. But with all due respect to the sensitivities of Mr Gove’s latte circle, we of less precious disposition can handle ‘great television’, and even the most po-faced member of the White House press pool must have been just a teeny bit entertained by the Vance-Trump bad cop/worse cop smackdown of the arguably overindulged president of Ukraine.
This wasn’t rudeness so much as a typical New York business meeting conducted unapologetically in plain sight.
Give them their due, the European branch of Zelensky’s fan base contributed to the aesthetic. So offended were they on his behalf that they decided this was an obscenity which merited immediate summitry, the Sisyphean pointlessness of which was lost on its participants, yet obvious to those of us with a taste for the entertainingly preposterous.
Special mention must be made of our own Prime Minister, who having displayed a certain competence in dismantling the UK’s energy, food and border security felt it proper to apply his singular skill-set to the arguably more complicated and historically ambiguous tragedies of an Eastern European conflict. Keir Starmer is, let’s face it, an unlikely international hard man; more a lamb in wolf’s clothing.
And as the dust settles and the credits roll it’s become clear that the EU was so outraged by the great television that in an act of defiance it has unanimously agreed to do everything Starmer has asked them to, especially around defence expenditure.
The President has a gift for attracting the hatred of insufferable people and banking it for future use. Perhaps he was born with it. Which brings us to his address to the Congressional joint session, in which the Democrat House Representatives followed the logic of juvenile protest right through to its logical, albeit grotesque, conclusion.
Somewhere near the start of his speech but after the early forced departure of an extra who had presumably wandered in from Skid Row Trump predicted that this collection of woke lunatics, nonagenarian effigies and counterfeit Native Americans would refuse to clap him no matter what he went on to say. And for reasons which will confound future generations of political historians they made the strategically dubious decision to oblige him.
For close to 100 minutes the members of the opposing party, the best the left has to offer, discharged their constitutional duty by sitting on their hands – literally – as the President introduced heroes, relatives of murder victims and even a 13-year-old brain cancer survivor who spontaneously hugged the Secret Service chief who inducted him as an honorary agent.
There comes a time when hatred, no matter how well founded initially, turns on its host and begins to metastasise. This is what has happened to elements of the US left. They despise their chief executive officer so much that they have forgotten how to be human.
Trump’s cinematic masterpiece did little more than make this obvious at the level of the elected avatars of hate who happened to have decent seats for premiere night. But we mustn’t diminish the role played by their media outriders. A snap CNN poll showed that Trump’s speech had gone down well. This was explained away as an outlier. Only a minority of people had stayed up to watch the event, warned the ‘news’ anchors. Which, it seems to me, is a bit like saying that the poll is unreliable because only the people who took part in it took part in it.
There comes a point where conformity is just tyranny, shored up by the co-dependence of those who collude in it. Seasoned political analysts, including Bill O’Reilly, are now speculating that the Democratic Party is on the verge of collapse. The US left is capable only of performative empathy, which is the only version of compassion available to the disordered soul.
The usual ‘narrative’ of the US election cycle, again written by ‘those who know how these things work’, is that the mid-terms are difficult for the incumbent party. Don’t bet on it. 2026 might turn out fine for the Republicans. The Democrat Party knelt for George Floyd but refused to stand for DJ Daniel, a child with brain cancer. Trump the TV guy has it on tape and can play it on repeat. Now that’s a ‘wrap’.
