The Trump Resistance is almost dead in DC

Washington, DC

The Special Relationship is dead, long live the special relationship. On Friday, at a “Stars and Stripes & Union Jack Celebration,” British and American right-wingers mingled gladly atop the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House. Nigel Farage and co smoked cigarettes with their Republican brethren and shared Trump war stories. Dolled-up American girls took selfies with Liz Truss. And Steve Bannon showered Lord Glasman, the Labour peer, with admiration. The horseshoe theory has gone full circle. I bumped into Truss at the bar. “You’re a Gove shill,” she told me, in that delightful, easygoing manner of hers. How did she think Kemi Badenoch was getting on, I asked, trying to change the subject. “Kemi is a Gove plant,” came the firm reply. Truss’s charms seem to be working on the Americans. “She’s super-based,” said a bald young man. “I can’t believe she was prime minister,” added a star-struck girl called Mackenzie. No, Mackenzie, neither can we.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was not in town for the Donald’s Big Show. Neither was his likely successor, Marine Le Pen. Yet Éric Zemmour, leader of the Reconquête Party, and his influential partner Sarah Knafo were there. On Saturday, I met Zemmour in the lobby of his hotel. He wore a marvelously Gallic beige polo neck, and was rather sweetly boasting to his publisher, Diane Ouvry, about having already gone for a swim that morning. He seemed impressed that the public pools of Washington, DC are free at point of use. He then sat down and told me that Lafayette, the Frenchman who helped create Washington, was an “imbecile,” before describing, at some length, “the permanent reciprocal influences” between the French Revolution and the American one. He explained that Le Pen had shunned Trump because of her politically correct “de-diabatization” strategy. “For me, that means submitting to the dominant ideology of our day in order to be accepted by the system. If you do that and you win [an election], you won’t be able to govern afterwards because you haven’t prepared people for the paradigm shift.” Trump never compromises, he told me: “He is, like me, fighting this ideological battle. He rang me in 2022 and told me: ‘Don’t change, don’t give in, stay who you are.’”

Zemmour added: “You’re well aware that the ‘woke’ movement was born out of French theorists. But now, against that, there’s a big movement of peoples to defend their identity. They want Paris to be Paris, Rome to be Rome and New York to be New York. It’s all connected.” I pondered Éric’s words on Sunday, as I watched Trump dancing on stage to “YMCA” with the Village People, one of whom wore assless leather chaps.

At Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, I witnessed the smashing of windows, rioting and tens of thousands of angry women in “pussy hats” clamoring against his ascent. There was none of that rage for the 2025 sequel. In Farragut Square, two days before the ceremony, I ran into the small “People’s March” — fringey leftists, angry about Palestine, climate change and bodily autonomy. But it was not really an anti-Trump protest, per se. The Resistance, as it was known, proved futile. Now it’s almost dead.

The energy is on the radical right. On the eve of the inauguration, at the Watergate hotel, I attended the Passage “Coronation Ball,” an intriguing gathering of New Right thinkers, the Trumpist avant-garde. I overheard Dasha, the softer-faced one from that trendy Red Scare podcast, needling America’s foremost monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, for not believing that Jesus Christ was our Lord and Savior. Steve Bannon gave an extraordinary dinner speech, akin to a commander addressing his men before battle. He called his audience “the tip of the spear.” He called Trump “America’s Cincinnatus” and Mark Zuckerberg “a criminal who deserves to be in prison. I don’t care how many $1 million checks he writes.” “The Democrats created the oligarchs and it worked for them until it didn’t. And you, the Pepes, broke them,” he said.

“I want you to get drunk tonight. I want it to be raw tomorrow, OK? I want you hitting a little something when the ceremony is going on to take the edge off. But in the afternoon, when the first executive orders start hitting… when the External Revenue Service hits tariffs on our good buddies in Canada… OK, I love you men and women but I gotta tell you we are in for a tough fight. The hardest fight is ahead of us. They’re not going just sit there and just toss you the keys tomorrow. [For] the Deep State, the administrative state, this is Götterdämmerung. This is where we fight to the end. If we don’t take care of them in the next four years, they can’t be taken care of… You guys, every day: pounding, pounding, pounding, every day and being relentless. No mercy, no quarter, no prisoners. Are you ready for a fight?” The crowd, in black tie, stopped consuming their rather lovely scallops, stood up and roared.

Trump adopted a somewhat milder tone for his big speech the next day. He called his re-inauguration “Liberation Day.” Yet the ceremony was held inside, officially for weather reasons but probably out of safety fears. The Secret Service, the National Guard and Capitol Hill police effectively shut down much of the city for the occasion. The heart of America’s capital resembled a war zone: checkpoint after checkpoint, iron fencing everywhere and countless bossy men with guns barking at we, the people. Trump’s fans, many of whom had traveled thousands of miles to see their hero, were treated like cattle, herded into the Capitol Hill Arena to watch the event on a big screen. So much for the Land of the Free. The security state beats populism, every time. SAD!