David Lammy has a Trump problem

There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the comparison has been made on magazine covers from America to Germany. Neither is it uncommon for people to say that Trump is planning to usher in an authoritarian state and is a Nazi, neo-Nazi or similar.

After the attempted assassination of Trump last Saturday the people who went in for this sort of thing are in a certain bind. On the one hand they seem to sense that urging on the assassination of a political opponent is not a good look. On the other they can’t just reverse course and declare: “Of course it was just hyperbole.” As a result, the main response among Trump’s biggest critics presently seems to be: “He’s still Hitler but I’m glad he wasn’t killed.”

The tone of Lammy’s anti-Trump statements was more millennial troll than statesman-in-waiting

One of the people who finds himself in this tricky place is the new British foreign secretary, David Lammy — who is not a man of knowledge. Who can forget the edition of Celebrity Mastermind some years ago in which he suggested that Marie Antoinette had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for her work on radiation. And — more worryingly — when asked which monarch succeeded Henry VIII to the throne replied “Henry VII.” Lammy may be one of the only men on Earth who could benefit from listening to one of Kamala Harris’s disquisitions on the nature of time and the direction in which it flows.

Still, a lack of knowledge can be compensated for. What is harder to make up for is a lack of judgment. But Lammy has a deficit there too.

During Trump’s first year in office Lammy called him “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer.” A year later, in 2018, the then president of the United States made a visit to the UK. Ordinarily the visit of the leader of your most important ally should be a time for celebration. Any criticisms leveled ought to be diplomatic and judicious. Lammy’s were not. In Time magazine he called President Trump “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath.” He added that Trump represented “a profound threat to the international order.” He also called him a “tyrant in a toupee” and boasted that he would be among the protestors turning out in London to oppose his visit.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. For of course David Lammy is no longer a street protestor but the British foreign secretary. And Donald Trump is the favorite to win the US presidential elections in November.

No man knows the future, of course. But a wise person should be able to prepare for it. Did Lammy know that he might someday be in cabinet? I should have thought so. There was very little point in hanging around in British politics through the Miliband years, the Corbyn years and then the Starmer years simply because you wanted to exercise influence from the backbenches. Did Lammy not expect to be promoted? Or did he think he shouldn’t have been? Or did he think he would inevitably find himself in cabinet one day, but that he would always be blessed with US counterparts who agreed with him that the former president — and by extension those who worked for him and voted for him — were Nazis and KKK supporters?

Even the tone of Lammy’s tweets and statements against Trump was more that of a millennial troll than a statesman-in-waiting. In 2019, responding to Trump’s complaint that he had been “treated so badly” in office (thanks to the multiple attempts to indict and impeach him), Lammy replied: “Four US presidents have been assassinated snowflake.”

Last Saturday only a few millimetres of wind-change stopped that number becoming five. Or three in Lammy maths. And the language of “suck it up snowflake” seems even more inappropriate this week than it did five years ago. Is it wise to taunt others about attacks on their life and freedom? Does it seem judicious, for the sake of “owning” a political opponent, to tweet in such a way and leave such a hostage to fortune for your own future?

I should say not. But Lammy’s lack of judgment is not just a matter of record. It is likely to prove a serious problem at some stage. After all, Trump is not Joe Biden. Trump is rather world-class in remembering things. Especially negative things that people have said about him.

If the polls are right and he does indeed come back into office while Lammy is foreign secretary I can predict how it might go. Lammy may hope that Trump did not notice and does not care what somebody might have said about him. Yet while Trump does have the capacity to forgive, this tends only to come after a round of humiliating apologies. And it will be here that Lammy will find himself in a political corner — as so many of Trump’s opponents have done.

The heated rhetoric around Trump has hardly changed for nine years now. As recently as Saturday morning, the Democrats and their supporters in the American media were declaring Trump to be an existential threat to US democracy. And if you call somebody Hitler for years, and insist that democracy is on the verge of extinction, then it seems natural that somebody sometime will take you at your word and act on it.

In June 2016, a twenty-year-old British man called Michael Sandford tried to shoot Trump at a rally in Nevada. He spent a matter of months in prison before returning to the UK. Last week in Pennsylvania another twenty-year-old, Thomas Matthew Crooks, got closer to hitting his target. Whatever his motive, Crooks will have spent half his life being told from every direction that Trump is Hitler. I’m sure he didn’t listen to David Lammy. But he listened to someone. And Trump — and his supporters — will remember that.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.