This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I must lay bare my commitments. I think ideal government is something severe, elite and aloof. The brief rule of the Thirty receives a favourable notice in my book; I think the Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire were both grand arrangements. I supose that this smacks of Platonism, Leninism or worse, but it is what it is.

I am, however, also an American, Chesapeake-born, and go at things as I have taught myself — and one of the first lessons learned in These States, even for an autodidact, is that ideal government is so much gossamer and fairy-dust.

There’s a consolation: The American democratic circus is one of the stupidest, most delightful spectacles ever to grace the modern world. This season’s show is no different. On one hand, we find a brash television host, already once the chief executive, conducting a hostile occupation of his own nominal political party. (More on this anon.) On the other, we find a candidate whose main qualification is being visibly compos mentis, in contrast to the erstwhile candidate and (gulps all around) sitting president.

This all is very funny, but I don’t think Brits — or, at least, the liberals amongst you — are in on the joke. Let us take a peek at that ugly old Opinion tab of the Grauniad website on, for instance, 7 September: “Republicans want to steal reproductive freedom. Black women will suffer most”; “American democracy is in peril. And racism will be the sledgehammer that destroys it”; “The mainstream press is failing America — and people are understandably upset”; “The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean?”; “Donald Trump is deeply threatened by Kamala Harris — and desperately flailing”; “Young male voters are flocking to Trump — but he doesn’t have their interests at heart”.

By thunder, these people are worried about Donald Trump, the man from the television!

There are two fundamental reasons for British audiences to worry about Trump. One is legitimate, and one is not.

Trump is in the midst of selling his own party’s right wing down the river

The illegitimate agita arises from ideological commitments — an expansive liberalism, the same sort of soft-hearted, fuzzy-pated stuff that expresses itself primarily in rhetoric about what’s going on in the Muslim world vis-à-vis women and higher education. The Afghans or the Gazans or the Iranians or somebody are doing something unsavoury, as is their wont, and it’s our job to be angry about it. Trump is about to bring these (undoubtedly wretched) Afghan/Gazan/Iranian mores into the Western world, and the reversal of human progress anywhere is to be opposed strenuously.

Obviously, the first-order question here for any European is, who cares? It seems unlikely that the Americanos are going to conduct campaigns of regime change in the face of the dangerous degeneracies of Olaf Scholz or Sir Keir Starmer. If anything, the Trump supremacy over the American party of the right seems like the final nail in the coffin for a variety of social issues on which between a third and a half of my compatriots are more troglodytic than your average European.

In fact, Trump is in the midst of selling his own party’s right wing down the river. He has announced via his quasi-proprietary social platform, TRUTH, that his administration would be “great” for “reproductive rights”, which is American for “abortion”. By the same medium, he announced that, if he were to retake the White House, IVF — a practice that generally involves the creation and destruction of “excess” embryos — would be free for all comers. He intimated in an interview that Florida’s six-week abortion ban was too extreme, and that he would be voting for a state-level law re-legalising abortion through the entirety of pregnancy.

Similarly, he has repeatedly touted his endorsement as the “most pro-gay president” from the Log Cabin Republicans, a LGBT lobby within the party. His son Eric exultantly explained the former president’s long-time forward-looking opinions about sexual diversity in an interview during the Republican National Convention.

In recent rally speeches, the man who would build the wall has been touting the benefits of high-skill immigration. While we’re at it, the teetotaler from Queens is now testing a new cannabis legalisation stance on the youth podcast circuit, which is apparently festering with dopeheads.

Is this the “going back” of the Harris campaign’s perfervid warnings? We would hate to see what going forward involves. This all has actually been spooky enough for the social right of the party, your Catholics and Southern Baptists, that Trump has had to throw up some very hasty fig leaves, particularly reiterating his belief (in alignment with most European nations’ laws) that abortion until birth is radical and unacceptable.

We find the same prevailing situation on the economic justice front. Trump has sworn up and down to leave untouched American earned entitlement programs; he is the first Republican candidate in generations to propose an increase in taxes, namely through the use of the tariff. From yesteryear’s party of the interests, these are all serious concessions.

So much for the busybodyish fear of a reactionary planet. The more legitimate concern arises from a second Trump administration’s foreign policy — namely, that it may prove unpleasant and expensive for Europe, Brits (despite their best efforts) not excluded. Trump has noticed that Europe is very far away from These States, on the thither side of the world’s second-largest ocean, in fact; it is wealthy and chock-full of peace-loving liberals who are scared stiff at the idea that someone, somewhere, may have different principles from their own, let alone the idea that going to war with their fellow Euros may be a worthy way to while away a year or five à la the bad old days.

A second Trump administration seems likely to offload some amount of the American expenditure protecting this rich, pacific continent from — whatever it is that might menace it. Russia, I guess? The pariah power and economic backwater that has spent three years failing to wrest away a few provinces with significant Russian populations from its much weaker neighbour remains the major bogeyman in the neighbourhood. Plus ça change.

In any case, nobody likes spending money. This, at least, is a real worry, unlike handwringing about what a far-off potentate (democratically elected, to boot) may do within his own domain. Yet the bell seems to have already been rung. The American fisc is not what it was in 1960 or 1990 or even 2007. Something will give. The best way to obviate concerns that an end may come for the postwar American largesse toward the continent of lederhosen and turned cheese is for the Europeans not to rely so heavily on it. The very question provides the answer.

Briefly, Trump is a moderating force in American politics, and the real challenges he poses to Europe would come to light irrespective of American political leadership.

In truth, a jaundiced eye might see a figure more like Ted Heath than anyone — a man in danger of saddling his own party with a permanent internal opposition by pushing its hardline social and fiscal factions to the margins. In living memory, apparently serious Republican candidates have proposed truly radical policies on the income tax (Herman Cain), on social issues (Rick Santorum), on immigration (Fred Thompson).

These strains of American conservatism may now be recessive, but, a mere ten years ago, so were the protectionist and anti-interventionist elements of the coalition. As we have seen, a tendency repressed can come back with a vengeance.

Cards on the table: I have no European friends, I’ve spent most of my life in the New World, and my brief adventures beyond have taken me to rather more exotic corners of the map. But the Trump fixation seems to be a particular vice of the liberal Anglophone outlets. The French are distracted by the usual perversions and their fresh no-name prime minister; the Germans are absorbed in a bizarre little nightmare in which the formerly communist portion of their country has elected some very interesting right-wing politicos. (Le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany was 50 years too early.) No, in these waning days of the year of grace 2024, it falls to the crusaders of Britain’s Grauniad to go absolutely nuts — I mean certifiable — about the television personality and former president who appears to be on the verge of retaking nominal power in These States.

Maybe it’s the pretension of “owning” the language; maybe it’s an old residue of imperial ideology, the itch to dip an oar in every time zone. In any case, to the British liberal I say this: don’t worry. Donald Trump, if not exactly your friend, is an avatar for a strategic victory for your interest in pushing a particular kind of right thinking to the ends of the earth.

His threats to the pragmatic, non-ideological interests of your damp island are neither an emergency — the Russkies are hardly knocking at your door. Nor are they likely to be especially quickly executed. A hallmark of the first Trump administration was a sluggishness in policy implementation, as the American bureaucratic state dug its heels in against measures large and small. Why would a radical change to Yankee defence posture be handled differently?

Indeed, a Trump presidency in some way may be a victory for European liberals. In his current form, he does not threaten their core ideological commitments, he is unlikely to have the command power to execute swift changes to American foreign policy, and he will provide European political leaders with an excuse to reconfigure policies that secular dynamics have already rendered obsolescent. What more do you want?