Donald Trump has the smell of mortification on him, the stench of political death. It’s a smell that politicians recognise instantly on others. They know it a mile off.
This is why the US President is now one of the loneliest figures on the world stage. One by one, his allies have turned their backs on him.
Just months ago, it was different. How they loved him. He was the god-king, the herald, the harbinger of a dark new age. Kemi Badenoch’s first PMQs took place just after his election victory last November and she could barely contain her glee. She mocked then-foreign secretary David Lammy for criticising Trump and demanded Keir Starmer apologise for it. Her very first question as opposition leader was to demand the British Prime Minister debase himself before a hard-right American president.
Nigel Farage went further. He seemed ready to cut out his own heart and offer it to Trump on a platter, so he could feast on it at leisure. “His resilience is almost unbelievable,” he told LBC breathlessly. “We are witnessing the greatest political comeback of modern times.”
These were the standard reactions of right-wing populists across the world. Trump was the spear of destiny. His return to office suggested they were inevitable, that their movement could only succeed. Liberal democracy was dead and they were its undertakers.
Everything looks different today. Somewhere in Budapest right now, Viktor Orbán is trying to accept his defeat. He is finished, after 16 years in power.
Of his many regrets, Orbán’s most immediate will have been his decision to invite US Vice President JD Vance to campaign for him. Vance was, as you would expect venal and grotesque, in a way that was once startling but is now merely boring. But he was also something else: he was profoundly detrimental to Orbán’s cause.
As Vance spoke, the betting markets spasmed. The chance of an Orbán victory plummeted. He was a kind of electoral toxin, a death-merchant, the ruiner of political dreams.
Iran is the crucible that broke the American President’s spell. His actions there have been so disgraceful, so egregious, and so contrary to the interests of voters around the world, that it has simply become impossible to support them and maintain any hope of electoral victory.
He is now condemned by the Pope himself, as if we’re witnessing some kind of madcap enactment of the Book of Revelations. Trump doesn’t have the mind to handle that kind of challenge. He doesn’t even really seem to understand who the Pope is or what he does. “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he said of the Vatican leader, as if he were talking about the prime minister of a small regional state.
Vance himself is also deeply confused. It’s like watching two gerbils try to understand the plot of a Christopher Nolan film. He told the Pope: “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you have to be careful.” This is obviously the funniest thing you could say to the Pope. But also, given that Vance is supposedly a Catholic, it suggests he has really quite comprehensively misunderstood the power dynamic in his religion.
Trump’s attack on the Vatican made it impossible for hard-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to support him. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war,” she said in a statement.
This has killed her relationship with Trump. Just a year ago he was calling her “a marvellous woman” and “a great leader”. Last night he said: “I’m shocked by her. I thought she was brave. I was wrong.”
Not so long ago, political journalists would describe Trump’s attacks as a humiliation for the recipient. Now, things have changed. Meloni does not fear an attack from Trump. She desires it. She just just lost a referendum on judicial reform. She is vulnerable ahead of a general election next year. YouGov polling has found only 12 per cent of Italians have a positive view of Trump, two points fewer than in the UK. She requires clear blue water between her and the US President if she’s to survive.
French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has been having the same problem in France. “Donald Trump clearly did not fully appreciate the impact of his intervention [in Iran],” she told Le Parisien two weeks ago. “In fact, it is becoming apparent that very little preparation was done… We therefore feel that these strikes were carried out blindly.”
The same applies to the Reform UK leader. As the pollster Luke Tryl told Sky News yesterday while explaining the slump in Reform’s polling, the “biggest barrier to people voting for Reform is Trump”.
This is profound, not superficial. A vote for Reform is a roll of the dice. It is the kind of thing an electorate does when it feels things can’t get any worse. Events in the US – paramilitary raids, the shooting of demonstrators, the insane volatility – remind people of the danger.
“From focus groups,” Tryl said, “the general sense of chaos [Farage] might bring in the UK is kryptonite to would-be Reform voters… They can’t understand why Farage associates with Trump, and it’s the thing that makes them more nervous about ‘rolling the dice’.”
This is why Farage is furiously trying to distance himself. Trump’s genocide threats, he admits, went “way too far”.
Badenoch has taken the same decision. She’s not as jubilant about Trump as she was at her first PMQs. Suddenly, she has rediscovered her patriotism. She recently criticised Trump’s attacks on Starmer as “childish” and branded his recent actions – posting an image of himself as the messiah – as “preposterous” and “very bizarre”.
The scales have fallen from people’s eyes. And all the sad little right-wing grifters, the conservatives with no moral compass who were prepared to play-act as populists when it seemed a good bet, are drifting away.
Even two months ago this seemed unthinkable. Now, it seems inevitable. The global populist movement is in a moment of profound crisis. And Trump has rarely looked more alone.
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