Trump is the last chance to save the decaying West from terminal decline
Donald Trump is far from perfect, but he’s our only hope, the West’s unlikeliest of saviours, the latest in a select list of American presidents fated with rescuing the Old World from its own stupidity.
Left to our own devices, Britain and Europe stand no hope. Our moral and intellectual decline is too intense, our institutions too broken, our economy too kaput, our politicians too cowardly and our Blob too powerful. We can only whinge, virtue-signal, tax ourselves to death and surrender.
The good news is that we are about to be jolted out of our socialistic stupor. We need to be forced to spend more on defence, which is exactly what Trump will make us do. We need to be shamed into showing some mettle in the fight against extremists and anti-Semites. We need to be nudged, cajoled and inspired: if Trump is successful in his first 18 months, the global Overton window will shift dramatically Rightwards, demonstrating an alternative to Britain’s Gaia-worshipping, soft on crime, quasi-open borders, pro-appeasement politics.
Trump wants to unleash growth by slashing taxes and pursuing radical deregulation, liberating entrepreneurs and tech firms. He wants to ban DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), embracing meritocracy and the colour-blind society. He is planning an assault on the universities: they have become woke factories that specialise in brainwashing young people.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to drastically reduce the size of the state, fire vast numbers of civil servants, ban working from home in the public sector and eliminate endless regulations. Musk is sharing videos of Milton Friedman on X. Trump will take on the climate fanatics, and focus on cheap and plentiful energy, carbon-based and clean alike.
His crackdown on illegal immigration will be based on a simple premise: countries must be able to choose who they let in. Foreign criminals have no right to stay. Trump wants to reassert democratic control: his plan is to appoint more civil servants directly.
Unlike Keir Starmer, Trump is clear-headed about China. He grasps that it is a rival, hostile civilisation vying for global supremacy, the greatest threat to the West since fascism and communism. There is live talk in Washington that Trump may veto Britain’s surrender of the Chagos Islands – where the US and UK have a military base – to Mauritius and into China’s orbit.
The People’s Republic isn’t a pre-Western society, a couple of economic liberalisations away from joining the free world, as many of us once naively believed. China is a nightmarish, ultra-advanced, militaristic techno-tyranny that surveils and controls its people in a manner that dystopian fiction writers could only fantasise about. The Chinese Communist Party weaponises and perverts globalisation, commerce and the price system for its mercantilistic and imperialistic ends.
The scale of the economic divorce initiated by Trump is remarkable. In 2017-18, more than 21 per cent of US imports came from China; by 2023, this was down to 14 per cent. Does Britain really want to be dependent on China for electric cars if and when a real conflict breaks out in the South China Sea?
If Trump delivers on his plans, America will also spend vastly more on defence, and hopefully better, with reduced waste and a greater focus on modern technologies.
Trump was right to blame China for Covid: it probably covered up an accidental lab leak in Wuhan, and then normalised and exported lockdowns as the only solution, wreaking terrible havoc. While Britain is embarrassing itself by holding what is looking like a £200 million whitewash of an inquiry into our handling of the pandemic, Trump has gone nuclear: his appointment of multiple lockdown sceptics into positions of great power, not least Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, to lead the National Institutes of Health, are a game-changer.
Trump wants to reopen the debate about Covid, shake up the medical and pharmaceutical establishment, expose those – such as the calamitous former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, and the World Health Organisation – who wreaked such harm, and improve America’s preparedness so it can cope without shutting society down.
Trump’s administration looks like being the most pro-Israel in history, and implacably opposed to Iran’s mullahs and Islamists more generally. The cavalry, it would seem, has arrived, in the nick of time: it had started to feel as if the West had fallen, that it was too late to stem the tsunami of anti-Semitism and bigoted Israelophobia. Starmer’s unforgivable decision to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, followed by the ICC’s incendiary move to issue an arrest warrant for Benyamin Netanyahu, were the culmination of a campaign of victim-blaming, delegitimisation and historical falsification against the Jewish state.
All of this could soon be swept away: Trump is preparing to sanction the ICC and any country that collaborates with it, including Britain, and to go to war with much of the UN, a body captured by extremists, dictatorships and the far Left. He is going to apply “maximum pressure” on Iran to tackle its nuclear programme. Only America has the might to take on the global juristocracy, to reassert the supremacy of the nation-state, to expose the “human rights” lawyers as the dangerous Left-wing fanatics they truly are, to demonstrate that an alternative exists to this anti-democratic madness.
Tragically, there will be no good outcomes in Ukraine. It has been clear for a while that America, including the outgoing Democratic administration, was tiring of supporting Volodymyr Zelensky. While Harris sounded more sympathetic, she too would have ended up selling Kyiv down the river.
Trump will seek to end the war quickly, which means Putin retaining many of his stolen lands, but the president-elect won’t want Russia to be able to declare victory. Trump won’t allow Ukraine to join Nato, but otherwise his handling will be more robust than many Europeans suspect. The key will be whether Trump is able to force Europe into finally taking its own defence seriously: that, ultimately, would teach Putin a real lesson.
Trump will make mistakes, and won’t be right on everything. His style will grate with many in Britain, as will his bluster. His protectionism even towards allied states is one of many worries. But the mainstay of his agenda, if he delivers upon it, will transform not merely America but also global and British politics, very much for the better.