It is unfair to arrive at significant conclusions purely on the strength of anecdotal evidence. However, I would hazard the guess that had the electoral college for the president of the United States of America been limited to the media of the world’s democratic countries, where freedom of expression is broadly unchecked by political and plutocratic pressures, President Donald Trump would not have secured even 20% of votes. Had the electorate been enlarged to also include the faculty of institutions of higher learning, in short, the other significant opinion-makers, the proportion of Trump supporters would have plummeted still further.
That there is an unbridgeable distance separating those who voted for President Trump in real life and those who would rather he be despatched permanently to outer space in one of Elon Musk’s Space X vehicles is apparent. In the textbooks of politics — to call it a science, as is often done, is to make a virtue of the failure to anticipate human behaviour — it is often suggested that populist impulses frequently demolish what passes off as conventional wisdom. In the case of Trump’s second innings, it is becoming increasingly evident that the wisdom of the intellectual vanguard, not to speak of the beautiful people who set trends in the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, was about as distanced from the thinking of common folk as the French aristocracy was from the plebeians in 1789. Such a conclusion may well be a polemical exaggeration, but a measure of overstatement is necessary to understand why the first week of the second Trump administration has sent the entrenched influencers of the US and Europe running for cover.
It is not as if anything Trump has done in the first few days of his four-year term was a surprise. During the entire course of his election campaign, he made it quite clear that immigration to the US had reached unacceptable levels and that the country was becoming a human dustbin. As the results poured in on the night of November 5, 2024, it was also clear that Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric wasn’t the bigoted ranting of a 21st-century Archie Bunker but enjoyed support among nearly all ethnic groups in the US. The larger message was that it was the permissiveness of the liberal elites that was more out of tune with what Americans believed than Trump’s determination to pick and choose who could come to the US and who couldn’t.
The outrage that has greeted Trump’s initial measures — they may witness protracted legal challenges — to disincentivise border crossings and other less crude forms of queue jumping to gain US residency and citizenship is, under the circumstances, surprising. On top of that, he has put the diversity, equity and inclusive culture on the defensive, a move that must be welcome news to corporate America smarting under the weight of extreme versions of political correctness.
Cutting out the moral verbiage, the waves of indignation against the first round of correctives suggest that Trump is being berated for doing what he promised the voters he would do. The politically immoral implication is that Trump would earn immediate acceptability of the chattering classes if he embraced the path of pragmatism. In plain language, doing what his opponents would like him to do: absolutely nothing.
In just a week, Trump has set the alarm bells ringing all over the West. It is often said that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. With Trump blowing hard into his handkerchief, the Establishment of the European Union is fearful of developing pneumonia.
It is not merely a case of Elon Musk supporting the ‘far-Right’ Alternative for Deutschland, a party that is unlikely to become the governing party in the German Bundestag in the February election. What is triggering nervousness, if not panic, is that the red carpet being rolled out to the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, not to mention the indulgence of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the United Kingdom, will translate into a belief in countries such as France, Holland, Romania and Poland that the political opposition of the Eurocrats in Brussels can be countered with Trump on the side of the Right angels.
In 2017, in a book titled The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, the British writer, David Goodhart, had divided the peoples of Western Europe into two categories. There was, first, the “Anywhere” men/women, the proverbial cosmopolitans who personified an impatience with national boundaries and national identity. These were the people who set the terms of engagement in Davos. However, there was also the “Somewhere” people who saw virtue in rootedness and national cultures and for whom national sovereignty also meant political accountability. It was the Somewhere people that voted for Brexit and who are propelling the right of EU member states to refuse entry to immigrants who cannot fit into the cultural profile of the nation. Hungary, for example, is being charged a punitive fine of a million euros each day for its dogged refusal to take in migrants from West Asia and North Africa. The Somewhere brigade will find encouragement in Trump.
Last week, Trump took the battle to the heart of the enemy by addressing the global glitterati assembled in Davos. Without mincing words, he assaulted the EU’s pretensions: “The EU treats us very badly, they have a large tax. A very substantial one. They don’t take our farm products, and they don’t take our cars, yet they send cars to us by the millions. They put tariffs on things that we want to do.” The reports from Davos suggest that the likes of the imperious Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, are in a state of panic. She told the World Economic Forum gathering that the EU had to “engage early, discuss common interests and be ready to negotiate” with the US administration. A few months ago, such a climbdown would have been unimaginable.
Trump isn’t going to stop at just one multilateral body. His bulldozer has unsettled the overpaid and smug bureaucrats of the United Nations and its affiliate bodies. The prompt exit from the World Health Organization was largely anticipated and welcomed by those who had chafed at the body’s genuflection before China’s dodgy agenda. Rather than join the protests being masterminded by its own bureaucrats with one eye on UN sinecures, India should be supportive of all moves to unsettle this Tower of Babel. It is only when the old order is in retreat that the national aspirations of India — as opposed to the personal ambitions of Indians in the UN system — will begin to be accommodated.
Trump is in the process of turning the world order on its head. For the likes of India, this assault on iniquity can be largely beneficial.
