I was preparing to write this week about the shame and humiliation of all the prominent people – far too many senior UK politicians among them – who lauded Donald Trump to the rafters before belatedly coming to a realisation of his abject awfulness. A veritable business* of recent reverse ferrets that began with his disastrous Iran war, and seemed to culminate with his Republican Party suffering an unprecedented trouncing in the US midterm elections.
Then, fingers poised above the keyboard, I realised that we have been here before and began to wonder whether any of us should be counting chickens, even now.
When Trump lied egregiously about the result of the 2020 US presidential election, and then saw his lies propel a rampaging mob of supporters towards the cradle of American democracy, baying for the blood of his own vice president, the hand-wringing abandonments of previous praise came in thick and fast.
But when he returned to stand in the 2024 election, it was as if the attempted insurrection, and the lies that spawned it, had never happened. The consensus dissolved, and if there were any lingering misgivings about welcoming him back into the democratic fold after his violent and public rejection of its most basic tenets, they had dissipated entirely by the time he was reinstalled in the White House.
“People ask me what difference new leadership will make,” said the self-proclaimed gaffe-free zone Kemi Badenoch in February 2025. “Well, take a look at President Trump. He’s shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it’s the second time around when you really know how to fix them.”
This week, putting herself at a very real risk of whiplash, she claimed: “Trump is very charming in person, but you see the way that he talks about journalists, about individuals, it doesn’t meet the standards a statesman should meet – always wanting to get dirty in terms of insults and so on.”
Nigel Farage, inevitably, went one better. And once again, we only need to go back to February 2025 to hear him saying of Trump: “The bravest man I know.” Only last week, the Nostradamus de nos jours was on sparkling form, explaining: “I don’t go with the consensus that Trump is going to get absolutely smashed. This Republican Party is way better than it was 10 years ago when he first became president. And Elon Musk hasn’t chucked in $450m of his own money for fun. He’s helping.”
By the weekend, Farage was blaming the “complete wipeout” he had completely failed to predict on the Iran war he had called upon Sir Keir Starmer to join.
In the cheaper seats, Tory peer David Frost travelled all the way to Budapest in November 2024 to tell a crowd of Viktor Orbán fans that Trump’s second term was “a moment of huge potential, a massive opportunity for conservative movements across the world.” By April of this year, Trump’s disastrous intervention in Iran, which his party leader had seemed so certain the UK should support, constituted the crossing of a “moral line” somehow untouched by the events of 6 January.
Following the midterms, Frost now seems convinced that Trump is not to be trusted at all. Hilariously for a man ennobled by Boris Johnson, he opined last week: “A governing politician who has to break a promise explains why, and tries to bring his coalition with him.”
Trump with then prime minister Boris Johnson at the UN in New York in 2019 (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP)Speaking of Johnson, the disgraced former prime minister had insisted in 2024 that the world had felt “safer” and “more stable” under Trump. To his credit, Johnson didn’t wait for the midterm results to undertake his crunching U-turn, but given that he has never held a position he wasn’t prepared to abandon in a heartbeat, perhaps we shouldn’t be too generous.
“It is sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel,” he said last month. “And transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”
I could go on, and I could turn now to the massed ranks of Trump fans in the British media who are suddenly, albeit tacitly, acknowledging that the people they once derided as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” have been proved right. Just as they have been with the Johnson premiership, Brexit and Liz Truss’s mini-Budget.
But I won’t, because it would smack of triumphalism, and if we have learned anything from the last few years, it is that there is no act so awful, no conduct so depraved, and no defeat so crushing, that however florid their temporary repudiations, Trump’s erstwhile cheerleaders would not crawl back into his fold if self-interest demanded it. The aftermath of 6 January proved that beyond doubt.
It’s an odd interest, I confess, but I often wonder what might have happened in the aftermath of the most famous fables and fairy tales. Would the hare, for example, respond to defeat by the tortoise by henceforth pushing on for the finish line regardless of how confident he was of victory? And would the crowds who cheered the sartorial magnificence of the naked Emperor’s new clothes behave differently if it somehow happened again?
If Trump was the naked Emperor, and the likes of Badenoch, Farage, Frost and Johnson were in the crowd, I remain confident that they would be cheering their heads off all over again.
*This is the collective noun for ferrets. I looked it up.
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