Oh dear. I’ve always admired Jonathan Freedland, and he usually writes so well about America. But his latest contribution to the Donald Trump debate is dreadful. It is a Guardian video — the format doesn’t help — called ‘Dear America, this Donald Trump thing? It’s not just about you.’ In it, Freedland warns the US that the rest of the world will be very, very worried if Donald Trump is the Republican Party nominee. Watch and try not to cringe:
Surely, as a clever man, Freedland realises that such progressive special pleading is what fuels the Donald Trump phenomenon? It is so deeply patronising. Come on America, the Guardian is saying, you did so well when you elected Barack Obama. ‘Then the world was inspired,’ says Freedland. ‘Now we are scared.’
But the point is that Americans did vote for Obama — and look where it got them. Under Obama, the most powerful nation on earth has (quite sensibly in my view) tried to intervene militarily a little less. But then it found itself being blamed (by Freedland, funnily enough, who wanted Obama to bomb Syria) for not interfering more in the Middle East.
Lots of Americans, as I said in the Spectator a few weeks ago, are fed up of essentially paying for the free world only to be sneered at by the free world. Middle-income Americans are sick of watching other countries blossom through globalisation while their wages remain stagnant, which is why Donald Trump never stops saying the word ‘China’. Christian Americans are fed up of having their faith belittled by media organisations such as The Guardian. Americans whose sons and daughters have died in futile wars have had it with being told that their nation is either a bully on the world stage or negligent for not defending liberal values.
That’s why they are voting for Trump. They want the rest of world to stop telling them how to think and behave.
At the end of his video, Freedland tries to strike an emollient note. ‘There will be a surge of anti-Americanism,’ he says, ‘but it won’t be anti-Americanism, it will be anti-Trumpism.’ You see, little America, we love you really — just vote for a candidate that we, The Guardian, approve of, and we won’t loathe you. Hillary is a woman (nudge, nudge).
If I were an American watching that video, I’d think ‘Sod the lot of you. I’m voting for Trump.’
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