Charleston, South Carolina
H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard.
Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill with which Robert Caro is describing the career of Lyndon Baines Johnson. It will make for astonishing reading, but from my lowly perspective – a citizen of the United States who assiduously follows the news – it appears to be an administration that is flailing crazily. Harvard is being persecuted, presumably for the sin of being elitist; the EU will suffer steep tariffs one day, which are semi-abrogated the next, presumably for the heinous sin of having ‘ripped off’ the US, and so it goes on. Ukraine, we are assured, began the war with Russia, a war, we were told, that would be ended in one day by the Great Helmsman who vouchsafed to us that Vladimir Putin is ‘crazy’. By those standards Poland began the second world war, though few would disagree that Hitler, whose playbook Putin is following, was batshit crazy.
The US will probably survive the chaos. Yes, many brilliant scientists will emigrate and their work will improve our lives, whether they work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England. But cutting millions of federal dollars from cancer research will not hasten the cures, though Republicans in Congress tell us that it will help reduce the tax paid by America’s wealthy, so someone wins. I have a dog in that fight because my wife is in remission from leukaemia thanks to drugs developed in biomedical laboratories in Boston. Those labs will almost certainly close, and then God alone knows where or if my wife’s drugs will be made.
It is not just the utterances coming from the White House (now newly gilded with decorations inspired by Mar-a-Lago), but from cabinet members and acolytes of the Great Helmsman. Kristi Noem, whom I suspect most Britons only know as the puppy-killer, but who is now the Homeland Security Secretary in Trump’s cabinet, was asked last week to define habeas corpus. It is, she declared confidently, the constitutional right that the President has to be able to remove people from the United States. OMG, splat goes 900 years of legal history. Laura Loomer, whom most Britons are privileged to know nothing about, but who is close to Trump and is said to be influential in his ‘thinking’, was asked her reaction to the election of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to the papacy. Leo XIV, she asserted, is a ‘total Marxist’. Pope Leo’s sin, I suspect, is that he has sympathy for the most unfortunate in our society, which seems to me to be a Christian virtue but is in Ms Loomer’s view ‘gross’.
If you, like me, are depressed by the current government of the United States I can offer one consolation from Horace Walpole, who in 1776 opined that ‘this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel’. Keep laughing – it helps.
I realise that I am swimming against the current of The Spectator’s thinking, which has been firmly supportive of Trump, so I will cease and instead say I suspect that if a lot of Americans do emigrate to Britain, they will be constantly asked what they miss from their old country. I have that question weekly and glibly reply: ‘Cricket, rugby and real ale.’ But I am happy to say that the absence of cricket is mightily relieved by YouTube, which posts highlights of the day’s play in Test matches each evening. I can contentedly watch Joe Root’s greatest innings at any time, though I was once startled to see among the offerings YouTube suggested was one headed ‘England and South Africa play at Lourdes’. What a brilliant idea. Who needs Bazball when we can cross the Channel and expect a miracle? The next Ashes series should certainly be played in the Hautes-Pyrénées, unless, of course, the Marxist in the Vatican forbids it.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Storm is out now.
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