We’ve recorded almost 100 Lowdown podcasts, but this must be the grimmest. Charlie Sykes is not an American leftist who would automatically damn a Republican president.
On the contrary, he’s a famous conservative journalist, who opposed Trump from the start because he believed in defending the US Constitution from autocrats – a thoroughly conservative position (or, rather, it used to be)
We talked about the naivety of Keir Starmer and other European politicians who believe they can manipulate Trump, and the love of cruelty and lust for power of the American far right.
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Charlie said
Trump is a mad king but…
“The warnings were very clear that Trump 2.0 would be radically different than Trump 1.0. He is completely unburdened by any political or legal, guardrails.
“The guy wakes up and asks who does he dislike? Who’s sucked up to him, who’s praised him, who’s made him angry? And so there is a mad king aspect to it.”
We could see that this morning when we woke up to the news that Trump’s prosecutors were launching an unwarranted criminal case against Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, a reckless attack on the independence of the US central bank that could be the beginning of the end of the stock market bubble.
But as Charlie said, however capricious his behaviour is, it is a huge mistake for European politicians to think they can get round Trump with flattery, prizes and bribes as if he were a child we could manipulate. We should never forget that
The far right is serious
“Don’t underestimate these people or their animus towards Western democracies. Trump’s loathing and the disrespect is out there. The willingness to jettison decades worth of alliances is not just a matter of whim.
“NATO is a dead man walking at this point. Would the United States come to the defence of any of the Baltic countries if Russia attacked them? Does anybody seriously think that he will come to the defence of Taiwan if China decides that they are going to invade?
“All of those alliances are already hollowed out. They’re kind of zombie alliances as long as Donald Trump is in power.”
As so often what applies abroad applies at home. I pointed out to Charlie that outsiders found a weird disconnect in the commentary from many anti-Trump journalists in the US. On the one hand they warn of the dangers of an authoritarian state, on the other they assume the authoritarian state will allow the Democrats to beat them in free elections.
Will American democracy last?
“It’s a failure of imagination,” Charlie replied. “If Democrats really do believe that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the constitutional order, that he does represent this quasi-fascist development in American politics, they cannot then pivot to politics as usual.
“We have just seen the fifth anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol when Donald Trump led a violent conspiracy to overthrow the election. Donald Trump has already shown what he can do. So if you assume that there will be no election interference, that there will be no attempts to nullify and stop the election, that’s incredibly naïve.”
Please listen to the whole thing.
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Like Brexit, not talking honestly about Trump, is a subject that neither Labour nor Tory want to raise.
Thatcher's belief in democracy and the rule of law would be a bit leftist in the current iteration of the Tory Party
I know you say this a lot, but it is really noticeable just how many anti-Trump conservatives there are in the US compared to anti-Farage ones in the UK.