The great Trump disaster: Now the far right can let rip

We’ve put up an emergency podcast with my namesake Ben Cohen of the Banter in Washington D.C.

You can listen here on Apple

Or on Spotify

Or on Amazon here.

Ben (like me) thought that Harris would win. We talk about the blame game that has already begun following her terrible defeat. Is the US left too woke? Did inflation and immigration do for the Democrats?

These debates are essential. If you live through a disaster, you must understand what it reveals about your failings. (You can tell the British Tories aren’t serious, incidentally, because they have ducked an honest confrontation with their past.)

But the urgent question is what happens next. Nothing good by the look of it. The US state is about to be turned into a trough for Trump supporters to feed from.

They have been quite explicit about their intentions.

For one of the most disturbing aspects of this election is that, however outrageously he lied, Trump was truthful in his way and showed us who he was.

He will fire independent civil servants and give their jobs and salaries to political appointees. The US right, which goes on and on about its hatred for big government, is about to dine long and well on other people’s money, like mafia bosses enjoying the takings from a protection racket.

Trump wants to punish media organisations that crossed him, cut deals with dictators and use the government machine to pursue his enemies.  He wants to set up concentration camps and deport millions of migrants – a task that would require a police state.

He wants tariffs – that would send consumer prices soaring.

How do we know? Trump told us, and looked every inch the semi-senile gibbering fool as he did it.

He lied about migrants eating cats and dogs and rambled about the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick. And still he won!

Many American voters simply did not believe the warnings from left-wingers who have cried wolf too often before. They reassured themselves that Trump’s first term wasn’t so bad, after all.

The difference this time around is that Trump is surrounded by the hardmen of the far right rather than old-fashioned Republicans who staffed his first administration. Chief among them will be Elon Musk, who will be charged with slashing government spending.

Optimists hope that he will be a moderating figure. Below is a long read from me that focuses on his weird and clingy admiration for Vladimir Putin,  and it suggests he will be anything but.

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Elon Musk and the west’s fascist fifth column

In theory, it ought to be possible for opponents of Western support for Ukraine to oppose Vladimir Putin. They could denounce Russia’s illegal invasion, condemn the rapes and the torture, and wish the Ukrainian resistance well, while still saying that the war was no concern of ours.

In theory again, it ought to be possible to dismiss George Orwell’s line about pacifism “being objectively pro-fascist” as a calumny. People who want an end to war need not be fascists, for goodness’ sake. They can be peacemakers.

I have more sympathy than other pro-western commentators with those dismissed as isolationists in the US or Little Englanders in the UK. The failure to understand them helps explain the rise of populism. If you are living in the Midwest of the United States or English Midlands what is Russia to you or you to it? Why should you care about Russian imperialism, let alone be willing to sacrifice your nation’s blood and treasure to oppose it?  In Eastern Europe, Russia is a direct menace, but the Kremlin can seem a long way away if you live in the UK or Ireland, let alone Canada or the United States.

And yet, although there is no reason why opponents of helping Ukraine should support Russian fascism, the leaders of the anti-Ukraine movement across the West do in fact support Russian fascism.

They are objectively and indeed demonstrably “pro-fascist”.

They are not just saying that it is a “horrible” idea for the West to involve itself in “quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” to quote Neville Chamberlain’s words as he abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in 1938.  Chamberlain did not support the Nazis. He abhorred everything about them. He just did not want to commit the British empire to war

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump could not be more different from Neville Chamberlain.