Trump the bully: His admirers and placaters

Donald Trump will go down in history as the man who swung a wrecking ball at Western Democracy. By pandering to Vladimir Putin, the cold-blooded Russian dictator who is trying to turn back the clock to what he sees as a time of Russian imperial glory, Trump has given his fellow bully a much needed shot in the arm.

Trump is uneducated but he is canny in the way that a gangster boss is canny. He speaks the language of the streets, giving heart to the millions of disadvantaged Americans who identify with him. He has a way of throwing out insults and threats against all who challenge him, spurning diplomatic courtesies and displaying no political vision other than the crude expansion of American power at the expense of other peoples and nations. Such men are dangerous, especially when they occupy high office.

Among those who are bemused by the man’s lack of ethics is the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, a ‘gentleman’ educated in the old school of adversarial politics in which give and take were supposed to lead to reasonable compromise. Another such gentleman was Neville Chamberlain, dazzled by another politician occupying high office and determined to maintain peace at any price, including the sacrifice of the sovereignty of another East European country whose leaders were also excluded from the negotiating table at which the fate of their country was being determined.

Benjamin Netanyahu now joins the ranks of the gullible, those who believe that the man occupying the most powerful office in the world and making noises which seem to vindicate their own divisive solutions to the complex problems besetting Israel is really on their side.

Netanyahu and his fellow extremists now assume that they have carte blanche to go full speed ahead on their disastrous mission to crush every form of Palestinian dissent. Trump’s notion of moving the Gaza population ‘en masse’ out of Gaza in order to remodel the land as a pleasure garden in his own image is not only inhumane but mad. Yet it has Israel’s leader exulting like a child who has just achieved a win at a computer game. Reality does not enter into the equation.

It requires no great leap of the imagination to see in Trump the playground bully writ large. Like all bullies, he is at heart a coward who cozies up to strongmen and vents his spleen on those whom he sees as weak, regardless of what they stand for. And he has appointed as his sidekick a bully like himself, who now wields a chainsaw to demonstrate his ruthless destructive power.

The answer to these bullies is for those countries which still uphold democratic values to stand up to them, to dispense with diplomatic niceties, which in any case are scorned, and to present a united front. Considerable damage has already been done but sooner or later reality will start to shine through the fog.