The journalist in him, as he sits in the editor’s chair at The Spectator, knows that if he employed fact-checkers, they would be overwhelmed correcting the torrent of lies that emanate from the mouth of Donald Trump – and the keyboard of Elon Musk.
He knows Trump is lying when he blames Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, or claims that Volodymyr Zelensky has a 4 per cent approval rating, or that Ukraine’s president was sleeping when he was supposed to meet US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent. He also knows that Musk has turned X (formerly Twitter) into a sewer of abuse and misinformation, the exposure of which you might think was in the interests of the good old print media to which Michael Gove has returned.
But the politician in him holds on to some very simple truths: Trump is powerful, and right-wing, and politicians like Gove have to stay in with powerful men of the right.
Musk is powerful, too – not merely because he has money (and a lot of it), but also because of the influence he wields over his social media platform and the millions of people who use it worldwide. We’ve seen how the billionaire has skewed the algorithm to amplify right-wing voices, stripped back fact-checking and community moderating services, giving way to harmful rhetoric – and how he turns against anyone who dares question him, Trump, or their version of events. Gove doesn’t much fancy that kind of treatment, oh no.
So the cover story written by Gove in The Spectator this week – the week, remember, in which Trump chose to side with Russia over Nato, and Putin over Zelensky, and to upend security positions that have benefited the US and Europe for decades – is headlined “Get Real”, and is illustrated by an image of a giant Trump dressed as a headteacher, holding his cane, ready to thrash weaklings Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and a German wearing a D-for-Deutschland dunce’s cap.
Head to the website, where one of the “most popular” articles is not the editor’s but one by deputy editor Freddy Gray, headlined: “The cruellest thing about Trump v Zelensky: Trump’s right.” Really?
Those of us who have for some time pointed out that Trump is a pathological liar – that he is a narcissist, concerned only about himself, his wealth and his power, with an attraction to Vladimir Putin born of his desire to be every bit as rich, unchecked and authoritarian, and their shared belief that they should be entitled to carve up the planet between themselves and other “strongman leaders” – are regularly accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
The real TDS sufferers are those who, because they backed him once, feel they have to back him always; who feel that if anyone who can be labelled “woke” says Trump is wrong, their instinct must be to say that he is right. They should check out the symptoms of cult membership, chief among them “absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability; no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry; unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies, and persecutions”. And, most importantly, “the leader is always right; the leader is the exclusive means of knowing truth or receiving validation; no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible”.
Then they might pay a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, not far from where this mindbending, epoch-making insanity is playing out, and check out a poster there (assuming it hasn’t been removed as part of the DEI purge) on the 14 “warning signs of fascism” – “powerful and continuing nationalism; disdain for human rights; identification of enemies as a unifying cause; supremacy of the military; rampant sexism; controlled mass media; obsession with national security; religion and government intertwined; corporate power protected; labour power suppressed; disdain for intellectuals and the arts; obsession with crime and punishment; rampant cronyism and corruption; fraudulent elections”.
Putin ticks all 14. Trump is well down the track on 1 to 13 – and we should by now be fearful that No 14 might be just less than four years away. At which point, we can stand by for learned articles in The Spectator, and all around the right-wing media ecosystem, that will ask the question: “If China and Russia can survive without democracy, why can’t we?”
