Short of emigration, what is the best option for Britain’s dazzled Trump followers now their hero confirms he is not Europe’s ally but Vladimir Putin’s? That’s assuming what we can’t in the case of Nigel Farage MP: that they do not share the US president’s well-documented weakness for a genocidal invader. Even his more respectable British acolytes have until recently finessed, quite successfully, their love of Trump with his long history of Putin-pleasing. No one more so than Boris Johnson, former prime minister, self-styled saviour of Ukraine and still Trump’s most dependable British idiot.
To Johnson’s way of thinking, detailed in numerous Daily Mail columns, it is Trump-doubters who are always the ridiculous, panicking, hysterical, whingeing headless chickens. When Trump looked likely to win the US election, Johnson likened the reaction of the “western liberal intelligentsia” to “the shriek of elderly beldames leaping on the piano stool after spying a mouse in their petticoats”. The virile Johnson was more than willing to forget that business at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
With all the usual caveats, it is striking, sometimes uncanny, how often tributes to Trump by his UK supporters have echoed rhetoric in praise of an earlier political disruptor with territorial ambitions.
Here is Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail proprietor, for instance, writing in 1930 that his support for Germany’s Nazi party “had shocked the old women of three countries – France, Germany, and our own”. Like the beldame-connoisseur Johnson, who urges us to disregard Trump’s thuggery – “I have always found him, personally, a model of old-fashioned courtesy and good manners” – Rothermere would assure readers disconcerted by the public shrieking that the private Hitler was “a perfect gentleman”, who “brings to Europe the blessed prospect of peace”.
A century later, another Daily Mail writer, Nadine Dorries, was one of several prominent Conservatives claiming something similar for Trump. “I honestly believe that Trump can bring about world peace and prosperity.” By way of references, Dorries cited, like many of the president’s supporters, the strategic mastery outlined in his (ghostwritten) Art of the Deal. Have any of them actually read the chapter that details how Trump, having attempted various low ruses to dislodge residents from a newly acquired building he wished to demolish, ended up being accused of harassment? It could be of interest, anyway, to Gaza residents should Trump persist with dreams of a Palestinian-free luxury resort.
Admittedly, a little alleged harassment is unlikely to weigh with women like Dorries, Suella Braverman and Liz Truss (not forgetting proud feminist Johnson) who are happy to make light of – along with the invasion of the White House, environmental savagery and assorted criminal cases – Trump’s history of misogyny. For them, saviour qualities that polls suggest go unrecognised by most of the British population have earned him immunity from sustained sexist behaviour, from “Grab ’em by the pussy” to congratulating the prime minister, Keir Starmer, on his “beautiful” wife last month.
In the US for Trump’s inauguration, an ecstatic Braverman said that he provides “a glimmer of hope of what is possible in the west”. Fellow guest Truss, cementing the Norfolk-Mar-a-Lago axis, hailed the incoming president for “saving western civilisation”. Starting, as we now know, with Andrew Tate.
Inconveniently for Truss and other lead Trumpists including Robert Jenrick, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Piers Morgan, Priti Patel, Andrea Jenkyns and a number of Mail and Telegraph contributors, today’s online archive makes it trickier than in 1939 for the prominent and susceptible to pretend they were never infatuated with an amoral racist and conspiracy theorist.
Added to this evidence, the speed of Trump’s transition into full Russia allyship could help extravagant claims about his political genius being more rapidly understood as deranged than those, circulating last year, that rested on total public memory loss about Trump’s political past.
For the former Tory MP Rees-Mogg, for instance, Trump’s victory was “a success for democracy” and also, notwithstanding his thing for Putin, for “free speech”. The pivot towards Russia has not diminished his loyalty. “Reinvigorating democracy is also positive,” Mogg noted, finding something “creative” in Trump’s denial of military assistance to Ukraine, “the world may ultimately be a safer place”.
Braverman, the proud wearer of a Maga cap and perhaps the closest Trump has to a Unity Mitford (who favoured a golden swastika), considers his latest actions above all “a wake-up call for European nations”.
In news sources where recent expressions of admiration for Trump must adapt to growing public suspicion, there is no avoiding a more convoluted response. In the Telegraph, where he acclaimed Trump’s November victory with “Trump is the last chance to save the decaying west from terminal decline”, Allister Heath now reminds readers, “the reality is nuanced”.
Critical to this delicate work is the claim that anything that may to the uninitiated seem disgraceful about Trump, like his televised humiliation and abuse of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could in fact be proof of political sophistication beyond the grasp of literal-minded liberals: the sort of people who see Elon Musk, Trump favourite and Alternative for Germany sympathiser, extend his arm sharply upwards and think they’ve witnessed a Nazi salute.
Current advice for any Trump worshipper with reason to regret recent Rothermeresque effusions about renewed hope for western civilisation, is to emulate Boris Johnson. Step by step, they should advance from simple Trump idolator to the role of senior Trump interpreter. Supposing Trump comes up with something like (to Zelenskyy) “you should never have started it”, requires a Johnson, fluent in Trumpspeak, to translate: “Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.” What might sound wicked, according to his latest tutorial, is spoken by a “very compassionate man”.
Recent polling, inauspicious for Farage, suggests that Johnson’s linguistic efforts are finally paying off. When a UK legislator sings the praises of Trump, what they are actually saying is: “I am unworthy of political office.” Got it.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
