The Village People joined Donald Trump on stage at the conclusion of his pre-inauguration rally last night. ‘You won’t recognise them, they’re a little bigger, but that’s life,’ The Donald informed us beforehand, in one of the many interesting digressions in his long, long address. This was less of a speech and more of a mellifluous ramble of his achievements, with other odd interludes about handshakes and culture – ‘Silence Of The Lambs, anyone see that movie? Lovely movie’.
As Trump did his funny little one-potato, two-potato dance along with the fuller-figured but actually still very recognisable Village People, I had to keep reminding myself that this was by far the saner option at the American ballot box last November.
Will it always seem so strange? Tomorrow’s history books will simply note that Trump adopted a popular song, which is hardly unusual for a politician. The complexities of the juxtaposition – the sheer campness of it all –will be lost to time.
Even the second time around, Trump still feels abnormal. But then, so did Biden and Harris. In Britain we haven’t had what felt even vaguely like a ‘normal’ time of it for even longer.
When was the last time we lived in a ‘normal’ era? Some might point to the late 1990s during Tony Blair’s first term. 1998, Blair’s first full year in office, looks staggeringly and reassuringly dull. The only big domestic political story was the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. A quick flick of the Spectator’s 1998 front pages reveals a lost world of (comparative) calm, civility, with – dare I say it – occasionally the lack of a good cover story.
I think we have the frame wrong. The odd time was that brief apparent calm in the 90s. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when strikes, strife and rancorous political discourse – populated by wildly unusual characters like Michael Foot, Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill – was just ‘how things are’. It amuses me when younger conservatives reflect on the 1980s as a model of normality. It certainly didn’t feel like that at the time. Thatcher was widely regarded, even by supporters, as a bizarre character. Plus she was always fighting at least one high stakes battle, and the cultural left – hugely influential – were barking constantly about Armageddon.
Similarly, the 1960s must have felt dizzyingly disorienting, as a brief glimpse of the pop charts from their first and last year – from ‘Starry Eyed’ to ‘Honky Tonk Women’ – witnesses. Going further back, the speed at which novelties such as motor traffic, flight and then television became established make our worries about social media seem positively quaint.
Our current strangeness was born in the 1990s and 2000s. It was incremental, a frog-boil. Boring 1998 saw the first relaxation of the immigration system, the arrival of the Human Rights Act, and the first tinkering with the British constitution by the Blair regime. Nobody really noticed.
Such policies bore their fruit in the new century, with a dramatic escalation in political and social oddities after the financial crash of 2008. Covid, Black Lives Matter, Corbyn, Brexit, gender, hate marches, the rape gang scandal … so many odd and awful things have happened. A friend recently forwarded me the photographs of socially distanced Labour MPs taking the knee and making Black Power salutes on the parliamentary lawn in 2020. The level of madness is so high I’d blanked out that particular display of mania.
Trump is unusual in that he is comfortable with his own oddness. It’s impossible to imagine him worrying ‘oh, I hope I don’t make a fool of myself’, one of the key human qualities that almost all the human race shares. Compare this to the attempts by Theresa May or Ed Davey to ‘lean in’ to their strangeness. Ed Davey leading the Lib Dems in a singalong to ABBA’s ‘Take A Chance On Me’ at their 2024 conference was excruciating, like all his wacky stunts, because it was ‘aren’t I crazy eh’ deliberate.
One of the many disappointments of the Boris Johnson premiership was that he promised a disruptive eccentricity but governed very much in the Blair tradition. His one Trump-like pizazz moment – the proroguing of parliament to force the 2019 general election – was the handiwork of Dominic Cummings, another true oddity.
Today’s oddballs can be tomorrow’s fondly remembered great statesmen. Trump even touched on this during his ramble, imagining a future where children as yet unborn ask their parents who that legendary man Trump was. A normal political leader might think about this, but they’d never say it out loud, because what would people think?
In a mad world forged by ‘sane’ people like Blair, Merkel and Obama, I’ll take the loony option, please and thank you. As Trump would say: it’s the greatest option, it’s beautiful, it’s gonna be great.
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