Even Starmer can learn from Trump: boosterism sure beats gloomsterism

U.S. President Donald Trump
U.S. President Donald Trump

We like to think of ourselves as cousins of the Americans, kinfolk in the English speaking world. Yet watching the inauguration of Donald Trump on Monday as 47th president was to be reminded of how different we are, two countries divided by a common language, as George Bernard Shaw put it.

The ceremony took place in the Capitol Rotunda, a neoclassical building straight out of Imperial Rome. Yet the event felt less like the enthronement of an emperor and more like a revivalist meeting, replete with firebrand preachers and gospel singers. We have had nothing like that here since the English Civil War and the likes of Praise-God Barebone.

For British sensibilities, or mine at least, it was totally over the top, with kitsch religiosity bolted on to hard-nosed political vindictiveness. Trump talked about unity while trashing the legacy of his predecessor sitting just a few feet away.

His semi-messianic claim to have been “saved by God to make America great again” when he dodged an assassin’s bullet sounded almost unhinged to sensitive British ears. “We don’t do God,” as Alastair Campbell once said when an interviewer started to ask Tony Blair about Christianity.

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The former Labour prime minister was also prevented by his advisers from ending his address to the nation at the start of hostilities in Iraq with the message: “God bless you.”

Americans would find this bizarre. Every president is expected to end every statement with the words “God bless America”. Few in the audience in Washington appeared to find the divine proposition he had advanced remotely odd. There was no intake of breath as there would have been here, no tut-tutting, no rebuke from a bishop to a politician for straying into their spiritual world (unlike vice versa). This is par for the course for US presidents: remember Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill”?

Mr Trump went further by suggesting the USA is the promised land, beloved of the Almighty, whose eminence is a reflection of His glory. It is hard to think of another country whose leader would call on the Supreme Being to make a political point. Iran, maybe?

Yet it was impossible not to watch this extraordinary spectacle without a sneaking admiration and a pang of jealousy for the optimism, the positivity, the exceptionalism and the absence of doubt. Things would get better for everyone, from the rust-belt workers facing redundancy because of green policies to the super-rich able to cash in on America’s future prosperity.

White, black or Hispanic – all would share in the bounty. Useless bureaucracies would be slashed, the oil and gas beneath American feet brought to the surface and sold around the world and woke thought banished from our midst. Which leader in history ever felt it necessary to issue a diktat that there are two sexes, male and female?

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Even to have to say it is emblematic of the weird times we live in, of ancient verities turned on their heads and punishments meted out to those who challenge the new orthodoxies even when they are plainly insane. Mr Trump says he will stop wokery in its tracks. Let’s hope he does; but it has burrowed too deeply into our corporate and political bodies to expunge easily.

The inauguration ceremony and its aftermath, when the new president fired off scores of executive orders to shut down borders, impose tariffs and rename mountains, even as he hosted a dinner and danced with his wife at a ball, was both bonkers and compelling at the same time.

How many of us watched with a combination of open-mouthed astonishment and a secret wish that we had someone with a modicum of Trump’s overweening self-assurance (preferably without having been dragged through the courts on umpteen occasions).

We are beset by miserabilism, orchestrated by the duet of Downing Street doomsters who spent the first few months in office telling everyone how terrible things were going to be, only to spend the past few wondering why business confidence is shot to pieces and their poll ratings have collapsed.

Politics is not just “the art of the possible”, as Otto von Bismarck put it. It is also about selling optimism. Leaders who intone gloom and doom will only pass on their despair to the rest of us. Yet when a Tiggerish politician bounces into view in this country the forces of darkness close around them.

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Boris Johnson was derided for his “boosterism” yet he had no compunction about talking up the country’s ambitions, nor was he afraid to praise its past. His buoyancy was rewarded at the polls in 2019 and sustained for a year or two until Covid hit. At that point, he lost his mojo and fell into the arms of the conventionalists – for understandable reasons, it must be conceded, but it did for his premiership nonetheless.

Johnson was not someone to shirk calling Britain “great” – the clue, after all, is in the name – and neither were his predecessors. David Cameron once delivered a patriotic broadside at a G20 meeting in St Petersburg after a Russian official described Britain as “just a small island” to which “no one pays any attention”.

“Britain may be a small island, but I would challenge anyone to find a country with a prouder history, a bigger heart or greater resilience,” he said.

In his resignation speech after 10 years as prime minister, Tony Blair released his inner Trump: “The world knows it,” he said. “In our innermost thoughts, we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.”

Where are the optimists today? Boris has departed the scene, though like Cincinnatus he may yet return. Nigel Farage is tapping into deep-seated grievances but does he have the answers? Kemi Badenoch used her first big speech to atone for past mistakes and to rule out instant policy-making but needs quickly to convince voters that a Tory future is a better future.

Trashing the past and promising change, as both Labour and the Conservatives have done, is not enough. It lends itself to a lugubrious and downbeat political discourse. There is only a short time to persuade voters before they stop listening to the litany of gloom. Hope is a far more powerful sentiment, with or without God.