Just bring it on Donald, I found myself cheering, on hearing his ripostes to the UK’s political put-downs.
After relishing Piers Morgan’s interview with Mr Trump on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, I thought the man blinking well deserves to descend from Trump Towers to the six floors only of the White House – if only to wipe the smirks off the faces of his pious and pompous critics starting, over this side of the pond, with ‘Call Me Dave’ and Sadiq Khan, London’s victorious mayoral candidate. Nor should he forget the smug countenance of that ubiquitous saint – Angelina Jolie – who travels so hither and zither across the continents in search of virtue that he’d be hard pressed to keep up.
How I love him, hair and all. Politically correct he is not. How he made me laugh when he hit back.
“It looks like we’re not going to have a very good relationship”, says Trump in response to our posh but extraordinarily crass PM.
I was right behind him as he took on reports of Sadiq Khan saying he hoped he’d lose his presidential bid. He called the new London mayor “ignorant” and suggested they compete in an IQ test.
Well why not? It would be telling. Will Sadiq step up I wonder? I suspect not.
Mr Trump did backtrack on calls for a total shutdown of Muslims entering the US, showing he is not intractable on complex issues, though he still had a lot to say about Islamist terror:
“If you look at it worldwide, the world is blowing up. And it’s not people from Sweden doing the damage”.
Can anyone really argue with that? You have to love it. I did anyway.
What his critics still don’t get, as was so apparent on last weekend’s BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions, is that the more politicians – from Lord Ashdown to Rachel Reeves – team up to disparage him, the more his popularity grows.
The more they give us their ‘hyperbolics’ on his awfulness, for example, that Trump is a threat to international security, and the more they judge it morally unacceptable for Trump to dare to say that Muslim entry to the US should be controlled, the more they – the political establishment – reinforce just how out of touch with the public they have become.
When, I wonder, will these privileged and self satisfied representatives of ours realise that sticking to this sanctimonious view on the world is what is writing their own political obituary.
For the more our pompous politicians carry on up the superior judgement alley, the more the Trump phenomenon – a clear product of the public’s relief at some unashamed straight un-PC talking – will take hold.
Yet the politicos still do not get it. That the more they answer as they do, defending that left liberal virtue that has so exposed ordinary people to the vicissitudes of modernity and so damaged their lives, the more Trump’s down-to-earth uncomplicated message will appeal.
As last week’s Any Questions demonstrated, our political establishment has yet to learn anything from the Trump surge. Just as David Cameron’s and Sadiq Kahn’s smug put downs of this latest American political phenomenon demonstrated, the great and the good have zilch awareness of the contempt in which they are held by the public.
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