Last week Donald Trump had a heartfelt Thanksgiving message for the American people as they await his return to the White House. “Happy Thanksgiving to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he posted on his own Truth Social network on the day American families come together every year to count their many blessings.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2024
The message - with its barbed wit, its perfectly dissonant rhetoric breathlessly delivered in a single sentence, and dotted with his signature Random Capitalisations - was vintage Trump. Not for him the gentle seasonal bromides or traditional presidential invocations of national comity. Even his holiday greetings come laced with thorns and spittle. Merry Christmas, suckers!
Almost a decade after he first crashed through the doors of American politics, Trump remains the ultimate outlander in American public life. His background, his rhetoric, his style, his disdain for the norms and conventions of communication, institutions and even laws make him comfortably still the strangest character ever to have held the office of the most powerful man on the planet.
To say that Trump is a unique figure in American politics would be to redefine the word understatement. It is perhaps the only thing about him on which his supporters and opponents can agree. Listen carefully to the voices of Maga-hat wearing groupies and the television studio Never Trumpers and you realise he is loved and despised precisely because he is so different from anything they have ever seen in their lives.
To most foreigners, too, he remains a confounding character, lampooned, loathed and feared in equal measure; a DayGlo orange fool who also just happens to be out to destroy democracy and blow up the world. But to subscribe to this image of Trump as some grotesque cultural abnormality, a weird aberration in American history, is to completely miss his significance.
In fact, the secret to Trump’s success and the key to understanding what he represents is that he is the quintessential American. His triumphant return to the White House marks not the hostile capture of the levers of power by some freakish interloper but a decisive reaffirmation by the American people of their distinctiveness as a nation.
Because American - I use the term carefully - is the lingua franca of the world, because American popular culture is so deeply embedded in the consciousness of people everywhere, because American technology and its products supply the architecture of so much of our working and non-working lives, because almost every item of news that happens in America is transmitted instantly into every home and every phone in every corner of the planet, the rest of the world can be easily tricked into thinking that it knows America and that America is really just like the rest of us.
The ascendancy of the US-led democratic capitalist order in the past half-century further reinforces the sense that America is an easily recognisable and understandable place, with the same broad ideals and values as the rest of the world’s democracies and of those people elsewhere yearning for democracy.
This conceit is especially prevalent in Britain. But the appearance of linguistic and cultural commonality can be deceptive. For all the familiarity of its institutions the US is truly still a very foreign country. Founded in rebellion, created in service to an ideal, it remains a revolutionary country, its history dotted with periods of internal stress. Its presence on the world stage is disruptive; it is the ultimate Dangerous Nation, as the title of a book by the conservative author Robert Kagan put it some years ago.
Understanding America’s differentness provides a valuable key to grasping the meaning of the stresses and dynamics of American politics in the past 20 years. In many ways the political contest in the US in that time has been a competition between Democrats who have tried to make America less distinctive and more like the rest of the West, and Republicans intent on preserving American exceptionalism.
Under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Democrat administrations sought, as it were, to Make America Europe Again. They pursued social and economic policies at home designed to shave off the distinctiveness of America’s economy and society, and foreign policies that aligned with those of European allies.
So we got the Affordable Care Act, the expansion of welfare programmes, efforts to limit gun ownership and availability, the development of an industrial policy, passionate embrace of the climate change agenda and tough regulatory measures on business. Abroad, Obama and Biden were Europeans with American accents. They believed strongly in multilateralism, frequently subordinating US interests around the world to those of its wider alliances; like Europeans, exercising restraint and caution in the use of hard power.
Trump and the modern Republican Party promise a reassertion of US distinctiveness, with all the implications for domestic and international change that represents. At home, we can expect a repudiation of the social contract Democrats have tried to execute, with smaller government and more incentives for the exercise of individual choice. Overseas, Trump’s America will act like a Gulliver breaking free of the restraints of the Lilliputians of the rest of the West.
Sir Keir Starmer insisted this week that Britain did not have to choose between Europe and America in the Trump era. If he can make good on that pledge it will be quite a feat, as the freshly restored US president, the ultimate American, works to make America American again.
The Times
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