If you voted Remain, you’ll never ‘get’ Trump

How do you defend Donald Trump without coming across like a rabid lunatic? This was my challenge as the only ‘out’ Trumpophile on a panel at the Dublin Festival of Politics last weekend. What made me especially trepidatious is that Ireland is even more painfully right-on than we are these days. It has ditched most of that Roman Catholicism and Cúchulainn and Yeats malarkey and become just another compliant satrapy of the ahistorical, cultureless, communitarian Brussels empire.

Happily there are still one or two Irish who feel just as strongly as I do about what has been done to their wonderful country. There were about a dozen of them in the audience. Some sported red Make America Great Again baseball caps — an act which would probably have got them lynched in more sophisticated parts of town, such as that trendy hotel, the Clarence, that is part- owned by U2.

They were a rag-tag bunch: a genteel couple in their sixties, a young fox-hunting architect, a Northern Irish Catholic with mental health issues, a bearded anarcho-capitalist with the unmistakable ‘Black Irish’ features of a descendant of a shipwrecked Spanish Armada crewman, a brilliant accountant who resembled a farmer and had driven for 90 minutes because ‘you never get to hear views like yours in Ireland’. What they all had in common was this: they were misfits, rebels who felt like strangers in their own country, in a world that has changed almost beyond recognition. Had they been British I dare say they would have voted Leave, for the Trump and Brexit phenomena are, at bottom, the same: the revolt of the masses against the entrenched elite. If you voted Remain, you’ll never ‘get’ Trump. And it’s instructive, I think, that both losing factions have settled on the same ludicrous excuse for losing: that somehow it was the fault of those pesky Russians.