Donald Trump isn’t America’s saviour. His strategic carelessness threatens the free world
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‘I believe we all witnessed a miracle,” testified Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump’s most ardent Congressional supporter, “Before it [the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania] happened, the flag above got blown in the wind and got tied into what looked literally like an angel.”
O me of little faith, I missed it.
However, one must put aside personal doubts when considering the effect of divine providence on those who believe it has saved them. Before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of the Greek Chi Rho, which symbolises Jesus Christ. Below it, came the words: “In this sign, thou shalt conquer.” He embraced Christianity, thus endowing it with temporal power. Fact or fiction, this story has shaped subsequent history, sacred and (more often) profane.
Speaking to the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, Donald Trump tried to give credit where credit was due. He stood before them, he told the audience, only by “the grace of Almighty God”. “I had God on my side,” he added, rather as if the guy were an exceptionally high-net-worth Republican backer with a top-notch security detail.
And in J D Vance, his newly announced choice for vice-president, Mr Trump has as his running-mate an explicitly Christian (Catholic) writer, who can do the theological bits in which The Donald, let us be honest, has never shown deep interest.
Connoisseurs of political theatre can only applaud the Republicans for what they have pulled off this week. They have provided a breathtaking spectacle of faith, courage, ardour, razzmatazz and general MAGAlomania, from which Trump the near-jailbird and pantomime villain has emerged as Trump the Saviour.
At the same time, the rival playhouse of the Democrats has gone dark. Poor President Biden, at first forgetful of his lines, then specifically ill, has vanished. As early as this weekend, we may hear officially that the search for someone else to play his part is on.
I must admit that I am not immune to the excitement these events have stirred. It is an exhilarating pleasure to see the vastly powerful media establishment, which has so long sought to conceal President Biden’s frailties and exaggerate President Trump’s defects, abashed.
Forgive me, however, if I do not put on my genuine Stetson hat and elbow my way towards the journalistic equivalent of a selfie with the now probable next president of the United States. Forgive me if I inject some scepticism.
First of all, while no one can know the state of Mr Trump’s relations with his Maker, it does seem reasonable to guess that he is not Saul on the road to Damascus, a completely changed man. Despite his invocation of national unity in his acceptance speech on Thursday night, his bid to govern for “the whole of America” rather than half of it is more like a land-grab than a peace treaty.
I don’t hear him beating swords into ploughshares. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” were the first words he uttered when he realised that he had survived.
Behind the ear-bandaged nominee as he bestrode the stage this week, only one enormous word was displayed, picked out in the sort of lights used to assist make-up artists backstage: “TRUMP”.
For the Democrats, back in the day, Barack Obama was billed as “HOPE”. For Labour, Sir Keir Starmer is “CHANGE”. The Republicans are “TRUMP”, and nothing else, not even God. That cannot be a healthy thing for a political party in a democracy. All its eggs are in the basket of one restless 78-year-old. What happens when he breaks them?
I worry about the eventual disappointment for millions of Americans. They are right to be angry about the cultural breakdown of their industrial working class and the stagnation of real wages for poorer people, about the trashing of Western culture even – no, particularly – in America’s greatest universities, about official indulgence of the horrible doctrines of Black Lives Matter, about drugs, violence, and cities newly crowded with bewildered immigrants.
But although Trump’s first term did, through tax cuts, bring some economic relief, it did little to solve most of these problems. It thrived more on antagonism than achievement.
Mr Trump’s is his supporters’ biggest voice ever, but what will he actually do, as opposed to say? His impatience with institutions and the processes by which laws are made and a country is administered is legendary. His rejection of such processes when he did not like the result of the 2020 election was borderline criminal.
And then there is the fate of the entire world to consider. One of Mr Trump’s clearest messages, amplified by his choice of J D Vance, is that he does not want to help Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin’s invasion. His strategic “realism”, advanced by policy advisers such as Elbridge Colby, looks at these issues through the “lens of pragmatism” and decides that America cannot deal with the Russia and China problems at the same time. Since the US and China are “the two heavyweight boxers”, that is where all the action should be, they say.
If this were just a military division-of-labour argument, it would make some sense. Mr Trump has always been right that America cannot help defend Europe if Europe will not defend itself. But he goes much further than this.
He seems not to accept that China and Russia see very clearly the link between grabbing Taiwan and grabbing Ukraine and wish to use it to break Western, especially American, power. His faith in the capacity of “one telephone call”, made by him, to calm it all down is astonishing. Despite his pugnacious character, his role model seems to be Neville Chamberlain, not Winston Churchill.
Trumpian neo-isolationism thinks as if the Second World War had never happened. Even then – an era of much slower communications and far fewer human and commercial links than today – the Western allies recognised that it was impossible to see the war in Europe and the war in the Far East as separate entities, except in operational terms. The threat was global: victory had to be global, too.
Mr Trump’s failure to acknowledge the globalisation of war threatens not only the Ukraine he proposes to neglect but also the Taiwan he says that he wants to help. He criticises that tiny island, up against opponents about 1.5 billion strong, for not doing enough for its own defence. He also recently complained, “They did take about 100 per cent of our chip business” (semi-conductors, not fried potatoes).
Compare this transactional carelessness with China’s long-term, implacable intent, and you can predict the likely winner.
I come back to the God stuff with which I began. As a believer myself, I welcome the signs of renewed interest in Christianity among the Western young. It is an awakening against nihilism, and against Islamist fanaticism.
But – more in the United States than in Britain – it contains a strand so disgusted with the degeneracy of Western liberalism that it falls for a charlatan like Putin when he says that he is doing the Lord’s work against our godless decadence.
It was much to the credit of the Leave campaign in Britain that – except for a few Faragiste/Ukip outliers – it never fell into this pit that Putin had tried to dig for it. But the Trump team has. Its effects could disable the free world.
