How Trump 2.0 will affect British politics

At the start of a rollercoaster ride, a motorized chain pulls the carriages up to the highest point of the circuit, emitting a clanking sound as a ratchet takes effect. When the clanking stops those in the cars know they are about to go over the top. The canniest politicians across the western world are hearing such a clanking sound right now. In just a month’s time, the second term of President Donald Trump will get underway and those with the closest connections to it are promising us all a wild ride.

According to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior advisor and continued confidant, we are going to see “as aggressive a first 100 days as any administration going back to FDR’s first 100 days.” “Now we have the House and the Senate, there’s support for his legislative agenda, for executive action, all of it. You are going to see people that are very aggressive on the main policies,’”he added.

Farage stands to benefit the most from what his potential supporters will view as a long overdue ideological proper job

Those main policies will include the expulsion of illegal immigrants by the tens of thousands, demands that NATO members increase defense spending — perhaps to as high as 3.5 percent of GDP — if they wish to continue sheltering under the US military umbrella, and vast numbers of redundancies among civil servants courtesy of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. There will also be big tax cuts aimed at firing up economic growth, a wave of tariffs on goods imported from other industrialized nations and a war-on-“woke” across academia and the public realm.

The major electoral realignment over which Trump has presided is going to be followed by a paradigm-busting political program. We are going to see what the art of the possible looks like in a context where almost anything is possible. 

It follows that there will be more than the usual ripples across the pond from Washington to Westminster when this change in US administration takes effect. Trump, J.D. Vance, Musk and the rest of the inner team will be tearing down the main features put in place by the liberal-left global political establishment.

This offers up challenges and opportunities to all the major UK political parties. Keir Starmer will be walking a tightrope — knowing that left-leaning British voters will be revolted by Trumpism while simultaneously trying to exploit the president’s obvious soft spot for Britain to win sweetheart terms on key issues such as defense and trade. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington means he will at least have a masterful exponent of the political deal to help him make the best of this ideological bad job.

Nigel Farage and Reform UK stand to benefit the most from what their potential supporters may well view as a long overdue ideological proper job. Seeing the most successful nation in the world prioritize its own citizens and send the “woke” left packing is bound to increase the appetite for a similar radical approach to be tried out here. Farage is the obvious man to spearhead it. 

The Tories, meanwhile, were gifted their version of Trump’s great realignment five years ago. They rode their own blue-collar tidal wave under their own charismatic blond bombshell. They didn’t use it to sort out illegal immigration, reduce legal immigration, cut the tax burden, reverse the march of “wokery” in the public or corporate sectors, get tougher on law and order, bail out of exorbitantly expensive and almost pointless climate change undertakings or do a hundred other conservative things that they might have. 

So every radical action during Trump’s first 100 days and beyond is liable also to be seen as a standing rebuke to the Tory hierarchy: a depiction of what might have been. This is the context in which Kemi Badenoch will be seen to carry on merely pondering committing to withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and just reviewing wider immigration policy. As Trump unleashes Musk and Vance, Badenoch will be taking economic advice from Mel Stride and foreign policy steers from Priti Patel — she who oversaw the massive “Boriswave” of immigration.

Badenoch’s defeated leadership rival Robert Jenrick has intuited these atmospheric changes better than any other Tory so far. Gone is the portly establishment Tory of the old order, replaced by a geezer in a flight jacket with a buzz cut, northern vowels and his own slot on GB News. 

Two years ago, Kemi was the face of common-sense conservatism, socking it to the out-of-touch high-ups in a leadership contest. This week she spoke warmly of a flat tax, which is a radical notion sure enough. But until she crushes the “One Nation” brigade on immigration policy the Trump effect will only benefit Farage. The clanking is about to stop and we shall see who is ready for what comes next.