Well! Well! well! We knew Donald Trump didn’t do things by halves but his comeback has been — appropriately — mega. It has stunned the world. His supporter, Elon Musk, doesn’t waste words. “Game, set and match” was his tweet as the key American election results came in.
Published: 7 November 2024
As they wring their hands and blame the uneducated for being racist (er, didn’t they vote in Barack Obama twice?) and sexist (er, didn’t Hilary Clinton blow it by dismissing Trump supporters as “deplorables”, and wasn’t Kamala Harris what the Americans call “a diversity hire”, chosen solely because of her sex and colour?), aren’t they proving once again that the average voter doesn’t think like them?
The pundits who predicted that Kamala Harris would win had completely forgotten the slogan invented by Bill Clinton’s strategist in 1992 that won him the election: “It’s the economy, stupid”.
Oft-repeated by wise candidates in many countries ever since, it was yet again the most important issue this year, but the pundits and left-wingers had forgotten it and Harris despised it.
She was happy on a planet where stinking rich celebrities ceaselessly hectored poor people about reproductive rights and racial injustice and she, like the liberal elite in general, is now once more stunned to discover that Trump knew that what mattered most for ordinary people was putting bread on the family table.
Oh, and having a patriotic president – who talks to them as friends and allies with humour and high optimism. They don’t care about the crudities.
How do his supporters cope with his criminal convictions? They don’t care. They think (not entirely without justification) that he’s been framed.
Last week, Konstantin Kisin, one of my very favourite satirists who also tells harsh truths, reported on the Trump rally he had just attended in New York which was being widely denounced as Nazi.
“The diversity of Nazis was unbelievable: Black Nazis, Latino Nazis, Asian Nazis, white Nazis and Jewish Nazis stood in an orderly line, chatting politely and cracking jokes. It was terrifying.”
Kisin, a Russian who came to the UK as a child, benefits from having the insight of an outsider who embraced their new country.
Yesterday, he gave some helpful advice: ”What the left needs now is a real Resistance. One that takes on and defeats identity politics, declinism, race baiting, censorship and anti-Americanism. One that embraces Western values of liberty, growth, free speech and celebrates the greatness of our civilisation.”
Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Conservative Party, who was born in London but lived mostly in Nigeria and the US until she returned to England at 16, has the same benefits.
The warmth of her remarks about Trump during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday was marked. She went bald-headed for the record of Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the Labour Party in general in their hostility towards him in the past.
She has no time for identity politics and will have curled her lip at being congratulated by Keir Starmer with condescension: “The first black leader of a Westminster party is a proud moment for our country.”
Badenoch told a BBC interviewer: “The best thing will be when we get to a point where the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes”.
The columnist Giles Coren asked her some time ago if she was worried that party members mightn’t vote for her because she was black. “Not for a minute,” she said. “If anything, the problem for them will be my age.” (She’s 44.)
Her shadow cabinet, she says, “draws on talents from across our party, based on meritocracy and with a breadth of experience and perspective”.
Alex Burghart, whom she has made shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, is white, male, and (on the basis of a one-hour meeting) I can assure you is not stale, is also shadowing the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster which is a job given to trusted and particularly influential ministers. His opposite number, Pat McFadden, is one of Keir Starmer’s closest advisers, whose responsibilities include crisis governance.
He is intelligent and sympathetic and a good person for Northern Ireland to have fighting its corner.
