THIS was the week that Donald Trump called the world’s bluff. It was the week that the rest of the West, once more, doubled down in denial. The great disrupter did his biggest disruption yet, sending the world into shock and Trump derangement syndrome into overdrive.
Charles Moore pontificating on the ideals rather than the reality of ‘free trade’ and the free movement of people – that only the ‘educated’ could understand (that’s not poor Mr Trump) – was par for the course. Maybe he mentioned the downsides of today’s ‘free trade’ fantasy that’s today’s very unfree globalism. I don’t know; I’d already stopped reading his embarrassingly snobbish and patronising ‘Trump doesn’t understand America’s true greatness’ and out-of-touch article. Mrs Thatcher’s maxims about good housekeeping sprang to mind. How happy would she have been about a ‘free trade’ reality that, in JD Vance’s words, ‘absorb all of the ridiculous trade practices and economic practices of friend and foe alike’; ones, as he says, that have left the US’s trade deficit with China totalling nearly $300billion last year, on the back of unfair trade practices, including forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, and state subsidies?
I don’t know about you, but I find the shock-horror response from Europe’s left progressive elite (sorry Mr Moore, but you’ve aligned with them) who’ve let their own countries and citizens go to the wall and are fast sending them back into a dark age of pre-democratic oppression and pre-industrialisation poverty, all the while using fear and smears of ideological ‘nationalism’ to taint Trump’s endeavour for his own country, to justify their fake moral high ground, reprehensible.
A press release from European Greens, took the biscuit. It positively gloated that Trump’s tariffs would hit farmers and businessmen (those ignorant and bigoted people who have been stupid enough to support far-right ‘patriot’ parties). One in the eye for the lot of them! Now they’ll find out what patriotism means, where MEGA and cosying up to Trump leads, it opined. I don’t think so. It’s not the far-right parties who are in government, in case they hadn’t noticed. France and Germany’s efforts to make sure leading opposition parties never will never reach office must have passed them by.
Look at what happened this week: ‘Marine Le Pen, leader of the nationalist Rassemblement National (RN) has not just been banned from standing for the third time for the French presidency, she has also been sentenced to two years in prison (though she will be fitted with a tag and kept under ‘house arrest’) with another two years suspended’. Here are Richard Ings’ words the day after.
No, it’s not Germany’s AfD, or Spain’s patriotic Vox, or France’s RN to whom Trump has thrown the gauntlet down. It’s the EU’s political establishment that prevents them, whatever votes they get, from standing ‘by “independent” judicial fiat’ and then throws them in prison. ‘Move over, Putin. Welcome to democracy à la française’. And a la allemande, Richard could have added two days later.
What we’re getting from Europe’s elites is yet another Orwellian inversion of the truth.
It was only a few weeks ago that Germany’s so-called centre-right Christian Democratic Union (nothing very democratic or right about it) excluded the AfD from their coalition though they came a high second in the election. Now, geed up by France’s Le Pen criminal sentence, they’re proposing to ban any politician they deem extremist from running for office.
That, I suspect, means any ‘nationalist’. Well, I doubt this type of totalitarian crackdown will go down any better there than it has in France. A poll following Le Pen’s prison sentence shows 49 per cent of French people now want Le Pen to stand for president – 7 per cent up on last month.
Donald Trump is right: it is a ‘witch hunt’. JD Vance is right, too. It’s ‘not democracy’. But France and Germany aren’t listening, nor is Starmer, who’s doing his best to tie the UK back into the EU, as I wrote last week. It’s as if, since JD Vance’s speech in Munich, they’ve made a concerted decision to double down, not just on free speech but on political opposition. Is that the reason Nigel Farage is so determinedly tacking to the centre, if not to the left? Does he fear that would be the fate of a nationalist patriotic party in the UK too?
It made me think. A Prime Minister and a judiciary that can witness Peter Lynch’s suicide in prison, Lucy Donnelly’s continued incarceration without a blink, and that has just found Livia Tossici-Bolt guilty, (despite the principled US interest in the case) that vindictively fined her £20,000 for standing silently within an abortion ‘buffer zone’ with a sign reading ‘here to talk, if you want’, is capable of anything.
This week, JD Vance, by contrast, ‘walked towards the fire’. That’s Ben Shapiro’s phrase in his manual on how to deal with bullies and the Left’s culture of fear and intimidation (before they banged you up for wrong speak that is).
Vance has made himself the torch bearer for virtuous nationalism. Roger Scruton would approve.
‘For the first time in probably 40 years, we have an American president who’s saying, “no more” […] he’s not going to allow America to be taken advantage of anymore’. It’s a decision that’s going to have ‘incredible benefits for American workers’ witnessed by the number of American and foreign manufacturers saying they’re going to build or expand plants in America. ‘That means more workers with good middle-class jobs. That means more self-sufficiency in the United States of America.’ However, it can’t happen unless you have a president ‘who fights back against these ridiculous trade practices’.
All these other countries, he went on in an interview with Breitbart, have applied tariffs to the United States and non-tariff barriers to the United States for a generation. ‘If it was so terrible, why do these countries keep on doing it? If it’s so terrible, why are these countries calling us, lobbying us, begging us not to do this thing? It just doesn’t make any sense’.
Quite so. It is a common sense that the Western world has become very removed from. The need for more self-sufficiency, to make more of ‘our own stuff’, to have a foreign policy that puts the interest of its citizens first and ‘an economic policy that does the same’.
‘This is “nationalism”’, he said, ‘on display for the world’, to ‘make America wealthy again’ after being ‘ripped off for more than 50 years’.
Yes, he used the N word. Meaning the good in nationalism, as Roger Scruton would have put it, not an ideology of dominance, but one that reflects love of country. One which sees nation as loyalty. Something we are desperately in need of here too. Yet the rest of the West’s leaders, like the demented and ideological European Greens, seem congenitally incapable of taking this lesson from Trump’s tariff rebalance.
What’s for sure, Europe’s regressive clampdown on free speech and political rights will only make its citizens more disenchanted, more angry, more fearful. More likely to take to the streets, in stoic defence of their political rights and a virtuous nationalism.
