Almost a decade ago, when his first campaign for the presidency was a mere publicity stunt, Donald Trump amused his audience at a meeting at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa with a rather prescient quip: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Well, despite the Supreme Court’s foolhardy decision to grant him blanket presidential immunity, things haven’t yet quite deteriorated that far. But recent, ever-more dictatorial behaviour on the part of Trump brings his “joke” to mind again.
It illuminates a question that becomes more pressing, more puzzling and more depressing with every passing day of the second Trump presidency. Exactly what does this despot have to do for some people to call him out? Hopefully, not a homicide in cold blood in New York City – but still…
Some prominent commentators sympathetic to the Trump project have had the integrity and self-pride to re-examine their previous conditional support for him. Andrew Neil, for example, declares that the president is an “unprincipled, narcissistic charlatan who doesn’t give a damn about democracy”. Never a Trump fanboy, Neil admits he gave him the benefit of the doubt over the “vacuous” Kamala Harris, but his worst fears have now been exceeded.
Neil’s apostasy was greeted online with plenty of comments along the lines of “what took you so long, Andrew?” Fair comment, especially after a whole four years of the previous Trump presidency, the Project 2025 unofficial manifesto and, most graphically, the attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021 should all have left no doubt about Trump’s malevolent intentions.
And yet Neil has the self-pride to admit his misjudgment. Others, however, are clinging to an increasingly absurd belief that Trump is a force for good, a peacemaker and a man who can be relied upon.
In Britain, the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage are high-profile victims of what we may term “Trump Delusion Syndrome” – a reluctance to accept the reality of the man and a cause they’ve invested so much political capital in. Perhaps, Liz and Boris see in Trump’s Lazarus-like resurrection a model for their own return to front-line politics, his Maga movement a vehicle for their own careers. Or maybe they just want to grift around the lucrative Maga speaking circuit.
In any case, they have gone a bit quiet about the man they claimed, despite all evidence to the contrary, was the saviour of the free world.
Truss and Johnson, unwisely as it turned out, enthusiastically endorsed Trump for the presidency, and now that he is smashing up the Atlantic Alliance and toying with the idea of withdrawing America from Nato, they find it difficult to unleash themselves from their ties of loyalty to the monster. Disgracefully, they have signally failed to support their “friend” Volodymyr Zelensky, even as he was publicly humiliated in the Oval Office. The silence of Johnson and Truss on social media has been deafening.
Although it feels a bygone age, it is not so very long ago, we may recall, that Johnson was prime minister and Truss his foreign secretary, and neither was preaching appeasement of Putin. Quite the opposite: they wanted the West to help Ukraine take back all the lands occupied by Russia since 2014 – not just since the 2022 invasion. Yet, only a few weeks ago, Johnson maintained: “No – I see no sign whatever that he [Trump] will betray the Ukrainians.”
Yet even now, when Trump realigns America towards Russia, idolises Putin, betrays Ukraine, demeans America’s allies, starts a global trade war and openly advocates territorial aggression towards Canada, Panama and Greenland, Johnson cannot find the gumption to give up his delusions about Trump.
Others are in an even trickier position. When Trump won the election last November, the current leader of opposition, Kemi Badenoch, teased Keir Starmer for past remarks by the foreign secretary, David Lammy, who once called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”. Right first time, David, we may think now. It would probably be just as well if Badenoch adopted a more critical approach to Trump, and dropped some of her equivocations about his foreign policy and despotic ways.
Of course, the real resistance to Trump can only be in America itself, and, crucially, in the Republican Party that Trump has parasitically preyed upon. Like one of those insects that eats its host from within, Maga has turned the party of Reagan into the party of Putin, and too many have supinely gone along with it.
Vice-president JD Vance once called Trump “Hitler”, but now he is mimicking Rudolf Hess. When he was a senator, Marco Rubio ran against Trump and called Putin a gangster, thug and war criminal. Now he is secretary of state, he sits there in the Oval Office while his once-hero Zelensky gets abused, impassively, gradually sinking deeper into the sofa like Homer Simpson retreats into a hedge in a popular social media meme, paralysed by embarrassment. Elon Musk once judged Trump – the president he now serves with wanting abandon – a “f***ing moron”.
We can already hear the clattering of scales falling from some people’s eyes as they process exactly what Trump is doing. The resistance to him is stirring. The worry is that Trump has got such a grip on the Republican Party, and thus on Congress, the Supreme Court and the independent agencies and leadership of the armed forces (recently purged), as well as vast sections of the media, that he will soon be in a similar position to, say, Viktor Orban in Hungary.
This is what the academics call “competitive authoritarianism” – a regime that retains some of the usual features of a free, democratic society, such as media critics and periodic elections, but which is tightly controlled and strictly authoritarian in nature, continually pressing against and breaching conventions, constitutional guardrails and international obligations.
Trump isn’t another Hitler, complete with death camps and a Gestapo; but he is the nearest thing America has ever come to such a fate – and that’s bad for the whole world.
