Boss Trump and the Lords of Misrule take over the Republic

It is shock and awe all the way from MAGA as they troll the liberal intelligentsia

Definitely not a Nazi

Donald Trump is a slob, a cheat, a lawbreaker, a bully, a careless liar, a cheap jingoist, and a very dangerous politician indeed. He appeals to the dark side and the chaos in human nature. His presidency may prove a disaster for the United States.

Those are the words of the Times columnist, and former Tory MP, Matthew Parris, previewing the inauguration of the 47th president and 45th president of the US. After careful consideration, I don’t think I can disagree with a word of it. He is all those things and more. He is a bully, threatening anyone who gets in his way. He has a casual disregard for the truth, unlike any previous president of the United States, certainly in the 20th century.

He is undoubtedly a jingoist, with his constant assertion of “America First” and his promise to strike terror into America’s enemies by a massive, shock-and-awe rearmament. This, even as he insists he is not only a peacemaker but someone who isn’t even a “war-starter.” This was somewhat contradicted by his effective declaration of war against Panama, threatening to take back the canal, the building of which he said cost 38,000 American lives.

However, we are stuck with him, and the task for journalists and anyone involved in the pontification trade must now be to try to understand just why this man, whose faults appear so manifest, persuaded the American public to vote him into office, not once but twice. How did this “convicted felon,” as he is repeatedly called by the mainstream US media, manage not only to increase his share of the vote but win a clean sweep of the key swing states and a near-clean sweep of the Senate and the House of Representatives?

There he was last night, sitting up late, cackling away as he issued executive orders on climate change, diversity, immigration, the World Health Organization, and many other precious causes of the US intelligentsia. Drill, baby, drill. “I was saved by God,” he said, taking the name of his creator in vain, “to make America great again.” This is Golden Age, as he modestly put it.

Most commentators agree with the Parris assessment, though they are backpedalling on BBC programmes like the Today podcast because they know that it all went a bit too far last time. I think we all realise now that pointing a finger at Trump’s mangled rhetoric, Armando Iannucci-style, and fact-checking his contradictory pronouncements is not the way to make sense of this disruptive political phenomenon. After 2016, the conventional media allowed its loathing for Trump—his childish language, his narcissism, his belligerence, and his apparent ignorance—to show only too clearly.

Even now, reading reports of Trump’s speeches, such as on the release of the January 6th “hostages,” as he puts it, you see copy littered with references to how things he said are “lies,” “falsehoods,” and “disproved” by the armies of fact-checkers employed by broadcasters like PBS and the BBC. Many of the things he has said have, of course, been untrue—like the infamous claim that immigrants in Springfield were eating pets. But the convention in the past has always been to let their adversaries rebut the assertions of politicians, not the broadcasters themselves. On Trump, they crossed over—we all did.

This reached its zenith when Twitter, Facebook, and others not only censored the president of the United States, as he still was on January 6th, 2021, but banned him from the biggest social media platforms on the planet. Silencing a politician who had just won the support of seventy-five million American voters was an extraordinary act of journalistic overreach, which will echo down the years. As will the distortion of what he actually said on the day of the Capitol riots, which no reasonable person could interpret as an explicit call for “insurrection.”

Those rioters were exonerated by executive order last night as Trump and Biden indulged in a bizarre and undignified battle of the pre-emptive pardons. Lawfare is now a key weapon in the political armoury of both sides.

This is all now history, and the mainstream media is also history in the US, according to the BBC’s Americast presenter, Justin Webb. “The old media is just SO over,” he announced on the Today podcast the morning after Trump’s night of the long knives. Politicians are no longer interested in being interviewed forensically by knights of the microphone like Andrew Neil and take their business to podcasters like Joe Rogan. Actually, the former stand-up comedian isn’t a pushover and had the gall to accuse Trump of speaking “some really crazy shit”—but the point is taken. US media companies like MSNBC, CNN, and the rest are being eclipsed by the new media disruptors.

Leading the disruption are the tech bros, as they are called. Elon Musk of X, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon were all present to bend the knee to Trump at his coronation. Trump has managed to secure a near-clean sweep of the biggest social media titans on the planet. He showcased them at his inauguration like a Caesar displaying defeated princes on a triumphal return to Rome. Look, he was saying, these are now my people—legacy media eat your heart out.

Musk went on to make a couple of stiff-armed salutes, which allowed the press to portray him as a Nazi. He denies an affiliation to National Socialism, of course. But looking again at it, I wonder if the X boss wasn’t trolling the mainstream media—making an ambiguous gesture he knew would be misinterpreted. Some Alternative für Deutschland politicians have been accused of doing something similar—winding up the people who really want to portray them as Nazis because they know that their target voters will shake their heads at attempts to discredit a libertarian party that is led by a lesbian and conspicuously supports Israel.

In modern politics, the meme is the message. Like Musk’s promotion of “Dark MAGA” or the projection of the green frog image, which Democrat politicians claimed was a white supremacist signal, it is all about tweaking the nose of the liberal establishment. MAGA men and women love it when their people play to the stereotype of being that “basket of deplorables” that Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters. It’s a little like working-class skinheads and punks in the 1970s tattooing themselves with swastikas and swearing at television interviewers. It is performative—though that doesn’t mean it isn’t disturbing.

I recall some of MAGA’s 4chan supporters in 2016 saying, in mock amazement, “We’ve elected a meme as president.” Perhaps this is the way to understand the Trump phenomenon. He is not so much a political agenda as a giant middle finger to the educated classes with their obsession with identity politics, their alphabet soup of sexual minorities, and above all their diversity DEI schemes, which have spread through the US education system, the corporate world, and the state bureaucracy like LA wildfire in the past decade. It’s no accident that Trump got the biggest standing ovation when he announced that, in future, there will be “only two genders” and that DEI racism will be driven from public life.

He is not in a position to do either, of course, since you can’t dictate how people feel, and diversity, inclusion, and equality are arguably inscribed in anti-racism and equal pay statutes. But he can rail against the obsession with racial awareness training in schools, “teaching our children to hate America.” His executive orders banning natal men from participating in women’s sporting events are a celebration of what is already happening across the world of athletics and swimming.

Trump is arguably surfing what they call the “vibe shift” that has already been sweeping across America. The “white privilege” and LGBTQIA2S narratives so beloved of bureaucrats academics academy and some school governors has been under challenge for some time - and not just on X. Like #MeToo, the presumption that white people are racist unless they are actively anti-racist, promoted by activist-influencers like Robin DiAngelo, is passing into history. Even racial minorities hate it—especially black and Latino men, who’ve been voting increasingly for Trump. When the president said that advancement should be “colour-blind and based on merit,” he was pushing at an open door.

Many feminists, like JK Rowling, will celebrate the trans vibe shift, even though they will not be doing so very publicly so as not to be contaminated by Trumpism. And while diversity is the signature doctrine of the liberal left, many intellectuals, have been turning away from intersectional metaphysics for some time now. BLM is largely history too. People are fed up with being lectured endlessly about slavery, the iniquitous history of which was drummed into them in school. Keir Starmer’s advisers are acutely aware of this shift in sentiment, which is why we hear him condemning “perverse ideas about community relations” which led to white girls in towns like Rotherham being left to the mercy of Asian grooming gangs.

America is changing; the world is changing. It is just unfortunate that it had to be Donald Trump and the Lords of Misrule who have been the agents of this “common sense revolution”. Intellectuals are not always on the right side of history. Ordinary people should be listened to when they raise legitimate objections to things like mass immigration. Perhaps that is the lesson we all need to reflect upon as we brace ourselves for the storms to come as The Donald is unleashed for four more years.

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