Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump walk on stage at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump walk on stage at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center

America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media. The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.

Donald Trump is 78, but he is a very modern politician with an intuitive grasp of how social fragmentation and the rise and fall of institutions can work for him. He has learnt to bypass network news and The New York Times. His brand of populist, multi-racial, working-class, highly online, Right-wing politics has captured the new centre-ground. It now looks as if 2016 was a mere dry run, derailed by Covid; 2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles, many excellent but some much more malign.

Trump thus appears to have clinched the majority of the US popular vote, the first time for Republicans since George W Bush in 2004 in the wake of 9/11. The party previously won an overall majority in 1988, when George H W Bush triumphed on Ronald Reagan’s coat-tails. The Republicans have also recaptured the Senate, and may well have retained the House. Trump’s vote in New York state, a Leftist bastion, was higher, at over 44 per cent, than the Tory high points in Britain in 1979 or 2019.

Demographics isn’t destiny. The exit polls suggest a 3-point swing away from Trump for whites, more than cancelled out by a 13-point swing to Republicans by Hispanics, a 6-point swing by Asians and a 12-point shift among “others”, all of whom increasingly vote according to their conservative values and economic self-interest. Trump made massive gains among non-white voters with or without a degree, while Harris won over male and female white voters with a degree.

Zapata County, Texas, which is 94 per cent Hispanic, voted 61 per cent for Trump. Osceola, the most Puerto Rican county in Florida, fell to Trump on a 14-point swing.

Voters are crying out for a crackdown on crime. They don’t want mass illegal immigration, even if they are immigrants themselves. They hate inflation. They want higher wages. They believe in the American dream, and are sick of the Democratic party’s anti-Western self-loathing, its unwillingness to properly fight Islamism and absurd campus extremism, its hateful normalisation of anti-Semitism, its anti-meritocratic wokery, its rejection of biological reality when it comes to sex. They are tired of wars, which is fair enough; sadly, Trump’s tragically misguided lack of support for Ukraine is also popular.

For Keir Starmer, the EU and the West’s Left-wing elites more generally, the scale of Trump’s triumph, and the fact that his team is much more professional this time around, is an existential disaster, the greatest blow since Brexit.

Trump will rightly want Britain and the rest of Europe to spend more on defence: this will ruin Rachel Reeves’ fiscal plans. If he imposes a 3 per cent of GDP military spending target for Nato, where will she find another 0.7 per cent of GDP? Will Britain allocate more resources to Ukraine if Trump cuts Volodymyr Zelensky off, or will Starmer, humiliatingly, sign up to whatever deal Trump forces upon Kyiv? As to the EU, it will prove itself irretrievably split.

Trump could veto the Chagos deal. He looks set to tackle the Iranian regime, especially given intelligence concerning a plot to assassinate him: what will his reaction be when he realises that Britain refuses to ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ? His administration will have no truck with Britain’s role in the persecution of Israel. The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice could easily be sanctioned by the US. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees will be defunded, and an assertive US administration will begin to treat those nations that don’t toe the line as hostile.

Gilt yields had already shot up as a result of Reeves’ extra borrowing; the prospect of a higher deficit in the US has sent global bond yields even higher, which will cost Reeves even more in interest payments. Trump will torpedo The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s corporate tax harmonisation scheme, exposing Britain’s lack of competitiveness. Lower taxes and deregulation in the US will accelerate the exodus of talent and capital from Britain. The Trump administration will react with fury (and potential sanctions) if British competition authorities crack down on US tech firms, or if regulators attack Elon Musk’s X social network. Any decision by Trump to slap massive tariffs on US imports would be a grave error, and push the UK into recession.

With Joe Biden gone, Starmer has lost his biggest environmental ally: Trump wants to frack, and to cancel the Democratic green deal. He wants to quit the Paris Agreement, exposing the net zero project as a sham, ignored by emerging markets and the world’s largest economy alike. Britain will be pursuing higher prices and extensive rationing just as America opts for cheap energy, and it will be a calamity. Musk, one of Trump’s key advisers, supports decarbonisation, but via technological innovations that protect consumers. That is the right way to create sustainable environmental improvements, but is anathema to Ed Miliband and Starmer’s command-and-control approach.

Starmer will need to make up with the world’s most brilliant industrialist, who keeps tweeting insults at him and dismissing him as “two-tier Keir”. The trouble is that Musk and many of Trump’s other aides now have a dark, dystopian, often exaggerated view of Britain’s problems that could further toxify US-UK relations and destroy what is left of the special relationship. I miss no opportunity to decry the UK’s numerous pathologies, our lack of robustness towards extremists, our rampant crime and our insufficient protections for free speech. But many Republicans believe in a caricature of Britain and London, and often fail to understand UK law on contempt or incitement. Their critique goes too far, and they regularly retweet nonsense.

Donald Trump is a natural Britophile; his mother was Scottish-born and he loved meeting the Queen. Starmer needs to unleash a charm offensive before it is too late, but the reality is that Trump’s triumph is likely to be fatal for Starmer’s socialistic vision of Britain.