A lot of ink has already been spilt about Donald Trump’s landslide victory, so I won’t detain you very long. I also won’t bore you by trotting out all the obvious reasons to celebrate: he’s anti-woke, pro-free speech, wants to cut taxes, supports Israel, thinks Net Zero is bunkum and will stand up to China. True, he’s not as hawkish as I’d like on Ukraine and has protectionist tendencies. But you can’t have everything.
As for the hysterical claim that he’s a ‘fascist’, I’m with John Tierney, who wrote a good piece for City Journal a few days ago pointing out that the Biden-Harris administration has engaged in far more authoritarian behaviour than Trump did in 2016-20, prosecuting political opponents, strong-arming social media platforms to silence critics (under the guise of combatting mis- and disinformation) and imposing the greatest restrictions on liberty in America’s history (during the pandemic).
Some people in the Westminster bubble think Trump’s victory is bad news for Britain because he’ll impose tariffs on British imports, but I think that’s unlikely and, in any event, Kamala Harris, like her boss, is no friend of Britain’s. As Pimlico Journal pointed out:
[T]here is little sign that Kamala Harris would be much warmer to Britain. The more fundamental problem is that the Democratic Party, having desecrated much of what remains of ‘WASP’ America, are now turning to attacking Britain itself. Many politically moderate Britons, whether on the centre-left or the centre-right, were taken aback by the apparent hostility of the New York Times to the monarchy – and Britain more generally – after the death of Elizabeth II. They should get used to it, because there is no doubt that, for the Democratic Party, Britain is a symbol of the old, racist, imperialist America, without rather than within. I’m sure you’ve seen the anti-Britain (and often also anti-France) memes on X. These don’t come from nowhere: they are, by now, symbols of something that Britain will not be able to escape in its relations with any Democratic administration. Actual national self-interest on the part of the Americans will increasingly be ignored, as Britain has become part of the broader American culture war. For this reason alone, no intelligent Briton should ever support the Democrats, no matter how boorish they think Donald Trump is.
But to my mind, the biggest reason to celebrate is that Trump wants to take on America’s vast federal bureaucracy – what he calls ‘the Deep State’ and which we call ‘the Blob’. During the campaign, he distanced himself from Project 25, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for wresting control of the administrative state, but J.D. Vance has said he thinks Trump should make it a priority to replace 5,000 civil servants with MAGA loyalists and Trump intends to hire Elon Musk as his ‘efficiency tsar’, tasking him with ruthlessly cutting waste in government agencies in much the same way he fired 80% of Twitter’s workforce without damaging the product.
There’s a good economic argument for doing this since it’s these bureaucrats who are stifling innovation and putting insurmountable obstacles in the path of new businesses. The regulators, as is well documented, are captured by the sectors they’re supposed to be regulating, helping giant corporations preserve their monopolies and who are often rewarded with well-paying jobs by those same corporations when they leave office.
But the best argument for dismantling the Blob is that it has become the main instrument for enforcing woke ideology. The federal bureaucracy is marinated in equity, diversity and inclusion, climate alarmism, LGBTQ+ rights, Critical Race Theory, Gender Identity Theory… all the sacred cows of radical progressive ideology. These civil servants, along with their allies in the academy and the media, are responsible for imposing what is, in effect, a new public morality on American society – a belief system that a majority of Americans have little sympathy for, as the election results made clear. It’s this ideology that’s responsible for the erosion of their freedoms in every aspect of their lives, whether it’s workplace speech codes or restrictions on their use of fossil fuels. Trump rightly understands that if you want to vanquish these torquemadas it’s not enough to defeat your political enemies at the ballot box; you need to defeat the vast army of unelected officials as well. This is the real battle.
If he succeeds – and it’s a big if – he will be an inspiration for rebel leaders all over the world, including the United Kingdom.
Stopping the imposition of this new secular religion by stealth is the most important political battle of our time.
In Trump, we may have found our General Patton.
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