The oddest thing is happening in Britain: Donald Trump is becoming popular. The man was almost universally abhorred during his first term. Leftists loathed him, naturally. But so did most rightists, partly for his character and partly for his policies, above all his soft spot for Vladimir Putin, his ambivalence about NATO, and his hankering after tariffs.
Shortly after the 2016 election, a famous British historian was addressing a conservative think tank in New York and made some (by British standards) mild jokes about the new president. It prompted a walkout. Even then, a cult was forming around the new president, a cult that tolerated no criticism. British conservatives soon learned to steer off the subject when in the company of our American friends.
How different it feels this time. GB News, Britain’s only rightist TV channel, almost burst with excitement as the results came in. Conservative newspapers dwelt lovingly on the inauguration, contrasting the flurry of executive orders with their limp Labour government.
Four years ago, a different British historian, Sir Niall Ferguson, called Trump “a demagogue and would-be tyrant.” Now he says that “the American electorate was collectively smarter than I was” in not seeing Jan. 6 as a coup attempt.
British lefties still detest the man, obviously. But opinion on the other side is shifting vertiginously. At the end of his first term, Trump’s approval ratings among British voters stood at 15%. Now they are at 34% and rising.
Watching the transformation among my friends, I think I have finally found the answer to a question that has bugged me for eight years. Why do people accept from Trump behavior that they would never tolerate from friends or family? Why are blue-collar workers relaxed about the selfishness, neediness, and cupidity (the foray into digital currency is only the latest in a sordid series)? Why do Christians overlook his lies and adulteries, fiscal conservatives his spending, foreign policy hawks his tendresse for tyrants?
Two words: negative polarization. If hurting the other side is your goal, Trump’s ugliest qualities — his dishonesty, egotism, and cruelty — become assets. Cry harder, libtards!
The transformation of the American Right in 2017 is being replicated in real time in Britain. Brits import U.S. culture wars fully formed, without adapting them to their own circumstances. Between 2014 and 2024, for example, the BBC devoted 21 times as much coverage to Black Lives Matter as to the scandal of the grooming gangs — arguably the worst crime in modern British history.
One aspect of the culture wars that Brits have bought into is an exuberant delight in irritating the other side. Almost all the newly converted Trumpsters I speak to express their support in terms of wiping the grins of smug liberal faces: “You should have heard the tone of voice on the BBC when they had to announce the results” etc.
Look, I get it. I am human enough to feel occasional promptings of it myself. But do we really want to pick the leader of the free world on the basis that it will make fools of those leftist commentators who said he had no hope? Is it good to have a convicted criminal in the White House simply because it will make our lamentable foreign secretary, David Lammy, have to row back from all the things he used to say about him?
Don’t get me wrong, Trump will do some admirable things. His tax cuts and energy policies will make Americans richer. The prospect of taming the administrative state is exciting. I hope he controls the southern border. And, from a more selfish point of view, he wants a trade deal between the two chief English-speaking nations. On balance, he was plainly preferable to Kamala Harris.
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But lots of people manage not to be Kamala Harris and, at the same time, not to go around threatening friendly countries with annexation. “Canada, you can always become a state, then we won’t have to tariff you,” Trump told an audience in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. Meanwhile, his officials are reportedly drawing up plans to put economic sanctions on Denmark so as to pressure it into handing over Greenland — a territory on which the United States has never had a claim. Are we suddenly OK with the end of the post-1945 world order based on international law and the sanctity of borders so that we can drink liberal tears?
And are we OK with this Latin American tendency to pardon your violent supporters — even those who assaulted the police? If it annoys the right people, apparently so.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
