One of the advantages of having three sons interested in sports is that our household succumbed to early pressure to get the full Sky package more than 20 years ago.
In those days Sky’s package included Fox News and I developed a strange fascination with the political slant of the channel. People now rarely speak about or remember the ultra-right Tea Party movement which emerged on the right of the Republican Party with radical libertarian economic views.
Presidents such as George Bush and Bill Clinton were regarded as soft-left patsies in the political pantheon imagined by the Tea Party. One of Fox’s more exotic contributors was Glenn Beck, who hosted an hour-long rant of political extremism.
By degrees, Beck evolved into a major proponent of outlandish political fantasies. One of them was that George Soros, himself a Jew, had caused or colluded with the transportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Another favourite theme was the political similarity between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler. With the aid of a blackboard, crazy connections were drawn between symbols including the swastika, Obama and the hammer and sickle.
Trumpism began to emerge in time for the Republican primaries in the 2016 presidential election. I followed the competition among right-wing Republicans with great care. Trump dismissed Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as “Fat Chris”. Present Secretary of State Marco Rubio was dubbed “Little Marco” and Florida’s Jeb Bush as “Low Energy Jeb”. Having entered the primary race, Trump appeared to sweep all before him into a trash can of politics.
His campaigning in the state primaries caught my attention, particularly his stump speech lasting 90 minutes or more at Fort Dodge in Iowa. Luckily, the entire speech was available on YouTube and I watched it several times with a mixture of fascination and disgust.
The Fort Dodge speech proved to me that Trump was a megalomaniac and a wholly untrustworthy clown. The strange thing was that this speech, in which everyone was attacked including the “lying media”, was rated by Trump supporters as his best ever.
So long before the contest crystallised in Autumn 2016 into a Donald Trump affair, I wrote a column warning of the extreme danger that Trump, although considered an outsider, was capable of winning the 2016 election in much the same way as Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.
I instanced the article written in 1933 in Studies, an Irish Jesuit periodical, by Ireland’s former ambassador to Weimar Germany, Daniel Binchy, who warned against the warmongering and tyrannical tendencies of Hitler.
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Binchy was unusual in two respects. Firstly, it was very unusual for a diplomat, even a retired diplomat, to voice such opinions about a European state with which Ireland had established diplomatic relations. Secondly, Binchy was able to recall attending an early Nazi rally in Munich in the early 1920s where he noted cruel characteristics of Hitler’s oratory.
All of my apprehensions in relation to Trump seemed to come true in his first term as president. The chaotic circus of dismissals and resignations from his group of personal appointees lent an absurdity to his term of office. But once he was beaten by Joe Biden, I warned here that although the Biden-Harris ticket had prevailed in 2020, a resurgent Trump had so much control over the Republican Party that he stood every chance of re-election in 2024, especially as the Biden-Harris ticket was likely to become jaded in the intervening period.
I was convinced that the Democrats had to find a charismatic centre ground candidate in order to forestall a second Trump term. The simple fact is that he has no difficulty in converting Sleepy Joe to Past-it Joe. Moreover the Democrats National Committee, the DNC, seemed utterly complacent about the weaknesses inherent in the Biden-Harris ticket. “More of the same” is simply not a saleable political position. And the predictable outcome was that the DNC would realise that Biden was a loser too late to replace him with anyone but Harris – a candidate with every possible disadvantage in right-wing America including gender, race and a very poor and lacklustre period as vice-president.
This time Trump appears to have learned some lessons, especially not to sack his own appointees to political office. Instead he has focused his bitter destructive agenda against parts of American society and office holders who appear to him to be ideologically hostile to his newfound political agenda.
The tariff war is a cruel exercise in self-destructive bluff. It has all the appearance of a major self-inflicted wound for the United States, perhaps to distract us with a mass clear-out of the Gaza Palestinians and an aerial war against Tehran in conjunction with Israel. The EU is now in his crosshairs.
