Breaking Trump

It was a week in which you could almost feel the world shudder. But Europe held firm.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Here’s what actually happened on Wednesday. An insane man threatened to launch an invasion of Greenland, lashed out with violent warnings at his audience, babbled a bunch of racist gibberish, then capitulated completely in the face of a united European front. He was as mad as a man in the nighttime, barking in the corners of his attic, assailed by invisible enemies.

But this, crucially, is not how he was covered. Instead, he was sanitised, sane-washed, morally laundered and normalised. Later, his outbursts would be reinterpreted as a kind of double-bluff threat gambit, lending a sense of strategic genius to incoherent ramblings.

The battle against Donald Trump takes place at several levels, but one of the core contests is about framing. This emerges from the media itself and also from the language used by other politicians.

How is his behaviour covered by the press? What are the narratives they promote? What are the assumptions in the headlines? Does the coverage omit his weaknesses and highlight his strengths, or do the opposite? Do supposedly neutral media outlets spread his worldview or limit it?

How do other world leaders talk about him? Do they make it clear that he is mad, or that he is an aggressor, or an imperialist? Or do they instead come up with euphemisms which serve to conceal his true nature? Worse, do they praise him, lavish him with compliments, in a bid to flatter him and escape his ire?

The triumph of the Trump project, its ability to frame the world, is composed of three things: His own utterances, the media coverage of him and the way other world leaders speak about him.

This defines reality. When the Trump frame is accepted, the world falls into his hands. When it is challenged, as it was during the end of his first term and during the insurrection, he is weakened.

This could prove to be a decisive week. It began with the usual Trump framing. But it ended with a sense of weakness and error, a wobble. An opportunity.

It all started in a depressingly familiar way. Trump was threatening the UK and others with tariffs because of their support for Greenland against his military threats. Keir Starmer held a conference in Downing Street. He said clearly that the threat of tariffs was “completely wrong” - probably his harshest criticism of Trump to date - but then fell back on his usual softly-softly form of emphatic reasonableness. He would find “pragmatic, sensible” solutions because he preferred “calm discussion” to “gesture politics”.

Then the US president went a step further and lashed out against Starmer directly, criticising the Chagos Islands deal.

There is no reason on earth why this should be considered embarrassing for the British prime minister. He did that deal and got the US president onside. Trump previously said “it’s going to work out very well”. US secretary of state Marco Rubio said it “secures the long-term, stable, and effective operation of the joint US-UK military facility at Diego Garcia”.

If anyone should be embarrassed it would logically be the US president. After all, Starmer’s repeated U-turns are reported as if they are signs of weak government. Why would this U-turn be treated differently? Logically, you would also expect UK newspapers to have a sense of national pride about the outburst, to want to defend British standing against an increasingly hostile power.

And yet that, of course, is not the framing. Here’s Politico’s newsletter from Wednesday morning, which is very widely read in Westminster. “Keir Starmer will face an awkward-as-hell PMQs thanks to the US president publicly dumping on the Chagos Islands deal… Of all the potential topics, there’s one huge gift for Kemi Badenoch: Trump calling the deal to hand the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius (which he signed off) an ‘act of great stupidity’.” Later, it dwells on the possibility of Trump meeting Nigel Farage in Davos instead of the prime minister. “Trump is in full-on humiliation mode right now. And the sight of the MAGA man meeting his old pal over Starmer really would be something.”

The Politico newsletter is generally very good. This edition was full of caveats and various bits of crucial nuance. This is an example from the very moderate end of the spectrum. But even here, in a straight-down-the-line report, look at the framing. This is a problem for Starmer, not Trump. This is a humiliation for the UK, not the US. It is Badenoch, Starmer’s opponent, who has received a huge gift.

Why? A US president is threatening the UK. According to the polls, that president is as unpopular in Britain as anyone since William the First. Why would that be a gift to Badenoch and not a weakness? Why would it be an advantage for her to stand against her own country, alongside a deeply unpopular foreign leader. Would this be the coverage if the president of the European Commission was speaking this way against a Tory prime minister?

The BBC’s Chris Mason was considerably worse. His analysis featured the headline: “Trump’s Chagos dig poses massive strategic question for Starmer.” Starmer’s warm relationship with Trump was an “unlikely success story”. Any disapproval from Trump was therefore a failure. Starmer should be worried that Trump’s disapproval will now focus on other matters too.

And what of the president himself? Is there any sense of failure that he is threatening a fellow Nato state, reverting to explicit colonialism or contradicting his own previous statements on Chagos? Hah, fuck no. Trump’s behaviour is sane-washed to within an inch of its life, stripped of all belligerence and lunacy and presented in jovial and back-slapping terms. Trump is “spinning, unpredictable, colourful and firing off reactions at every angle”, Mason tells us. His “colossal change of heart” on Chagos - that line is the closest we get to criticism - was delivered “in a characteristic blitz of capital letters”.

This is the more respectable end of the spectrum. The Chagos outburst led the right-wing press to drop any sense of patriotism or national loyalty whatsoever. Instead, it enthusiastically cheerleaded for a far stronger power as it sought to humiliate and then subjugate British political leadership.

Take the Sun, although we could conduct a similar operation on any of the other conservative outlets. Its news section adopted Trump’s framing almost to the letter. “DON THE WARPATH: Trump rips into ‘stupid’ Starmer for giving away Chagos Islands – saying allies’ ‘weakness’ is why US needs Greenland.” The copy made it clear that the “president’s U-turn marks a humiliating blow for Sir Keir”. In its comment pages, Harry Cole insisted that “Trump has dropped a Truth Bomb on Starmer’s Chagos Islands farce”. It then topped it off with an editorial demanding that “Starmer MUST rethink giving away the strategic Chagos Islands”.

The framing here is two-fold. First, there is the immediate political element. This type of coverage treats Trump as a soaring political success with the public behind him, whose aggression towards other leaders is invariably seen as their problem. Second, there is a broader, deeper and more dangerous ideological element.The coverage deals exclusively with strength. The key words are: humiliation, dominance, submission, weakness. We exclude, and are gradually learning not to use, words about justice, fairness, equality, cooperation, reason or conviction. These ideas are becoming so distant from the world that we are beginning to forget they exist.

This is Trump’s true triumph, his spiritual victory. It is not about the here and now. It is about fundamentally changing the way the world works, the operating parameters of geopolitics, of ideas in general. It is about stripping political life down to a base, primitive version of itself.

It is false to separate the media coverage from the political behaviour. In reality, there is no separation. Each informs the other. Trump’s language and worldview shapes the media coverage. The media coverage facilitates his behaviour. This coverage then encourages world leaders like Starmer or Nato secretary general Mark Rutte to speak to Trump as if he were a kind of emperor, which then encourages him to use even more bullying language. It is a downward spiral.

Then came the speech itself, which Trump delivered to Davos on Wednesday.

It was the speech of a madman. This isn’t surprising. Earlier in the week, Trump had written to the prime minister of Norway telling him that he was going to invade Greenland because they had not offered him the Nobel peace prize. Obviously that sentence, written down, sounds completely insane. And that is because the president of the United States is insane. How do we know that? We know it because that is what he wrote and only an insane person would have written such a thing.

The speech, delivered to a silent room and interrupted only by occasional expressions of dismay, was composed of racism, severe intellectual muddle, threats of violence and plaintive appeals for help.

He described Somali people as having a low IQ. Once upon a time, this would have been the end of it. An explicit and boastful expression of undeniable racism: that would have finished someone’s political career. Failing that, it would have dominated global media coverage. It would have been considered an historic embarrassment for the US. It would have been treated by the media as a moment of national shame. Instead, it was barely mentioned. It’s hard to find any reference to it at all.

Elsewhere he threatened America’s allies. “Canada lives because of the United States,” he said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” He sounded like a mob boss, or a vindictive grandfather, daydreaming about a youthful savagery he no longer possesses.

He repeatedly referred to events which did not take place. “After the war we gave Greenland back to Denmark,” he said. That did not happen. He went on a protracted and deranged rant about windmills. On four separate occasions he confused Greenland with Iceland. He quite literally had no idea which country he was threatening to invade.

It was mad. He is mad. If Joe Biden had given that speech it would have been treated as the ramblings of a madman. The US right would have asserted that narrative. The US press would have used it to frame their coverage. The US centre and the US left would have recognised that fact and accepted it, rather than pretended otherwise. Things would have changed.

But the same does not happen in the other direction. Once again, Trump was sane-washed. “Many of Mr Trump’s comments about energy were not grounded in reality,” the New York Times said, in a classic example of the kind of cowardly euphemistic language which defines its coverage and makes it unable to defend the democracy in which it is based. ITV News adopted a similar tone. “That was a classic Trump speech,” it said, “full of self praise, combative, emotionally charged and pretty light on detail. President Trump repeatedly made the claim that the US gave Greenland back after WWII. That’s a claim that is seriously contested”.

“Not grounded in reality”. “Seriously contested.” This is the vast lexicon-forest we have planted to avoid saying that the US president is visibly and demonstrably insane.

But for all his bellicosity, Trump was in a position of weakness. The Europeans, who are spoken about in gender-coded terms as limp-wrist weaklings by the US administration, actually held firm. The markets wobbled. A summit was called in Brussels to plan retaliation. Trump buckled. He ruled out using military force to invade Greenland. Later, due to unspecified and probably superficial offers from Rutte, he dropped his threat of tariffs too.

This was a welcome development. If things had continued to worsen after Davos, if Trump had actually launched an invasion, we would be living in a more terrifying world than the one we’re in now. But Rutte’s provision of an off-ramp to let Trump retreat with dignity is itself dangerous. It encourages the view that the softly-softly approach works.

Sky’s headline read: “Trump hails ‘incredible’ Davos trip - and promises Greenland ‘deal’ will be ‘amazing’ for US”. Once again, this great framing mechanism envelops the truth, strangles it. Everything he does is a triumph, even when he has lost all respect, U-turned on previous positions, and then backed down in the face of opposition.

On the face of it then, this has been another despairing week. Trump’s framing prevails. Media reports behave as if he is some kind of genius, then move on to the next crisis. The politicians like Rutte, who believe that only fawning over him can control him, can claim vindication. All the incentives are for him to behave this way again.

And yet something did change this week. It was not the media. It was politicians themselves. You could feel the balance of argument tilt from those of Rutte’s persuasion to those who want to adopt a harder line.

It started with Starmer himself, who has always been in the Rutte camp. At PMQs, he spoke out against Trump using much tougher language than we’ve heard from him before. In fact, this might be the toughest language we’ve heard from a British prime minister to a US president in my lifetime.

“President Trump deployed words on Chagos yesterday that were different to his previous words of welcome and support,” he said. “He deployed those words for the express purpose of putting pressure on me and Britain. He wants me to yield on my position, and I’m not going to do so … I will not yield. Britain will not yield on our principles and values about the future of Greenland and the threats of tariffs.”

French president Emmanuel Macron is not as hesitant as Starmer about challenging Trump, but even he was speaking with a severity which was unusual. “We do prefer respect to bullies,” he said. “And we do prefer rule of law to brutality.” Canadian prime minister Mark Carney gave one of the finest speeches I’ve heard in years, calling on medium-sized powers to work together so they can stand up to the US. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” he said. “We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” This echoed what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed in her speech. “The world has changed permanently,” she said. “We need to change with it.”

We may well be disappointed. European leaders love pretending everything is OK, because it is cheaper than accepting that it is not. They have persistently failed to undertake the kind of preparation, particularly on defence spending, which would allow us to operate independently of the US. Already, you can imagine Starmer returning to his policy of “pragmatic, sensible” solutions. Already German chancellor Friedrich Merz is warning that we should not be “too quick to write off the trans-Atlantic partnership”.

But there are signs that this week really was a breaking point. Yesterday, EU leaders met for their retaliation summit - now a combination of mourning event, group therapy and strategising session. Former Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the BBC that Trump should now expect “more firm response” from Europe. “Time has come to stand up against Trump,” he said.

Trump’s framing victory is a result of his own utterances, media coverage and rhetoric from world leaders. Now that third leg of the stool was wobbling. If it comes down, the media coverage can follow. These elements are not separate. They inform each other.

“I think we are past Munich now,” a senior diplomat told Politico. “We realise that appeasement is not the right policy anymore.” It ran this under the headline: “’Our American Dream is dead’: EU concedes Trump is not on its side.”

It’s been a rough, dangerous week. One of those weeks in which you could almost hear the world shudder. But the basic reality is that European leaders stuck together, held firm, and fired back. When they did so, Trump buckled. They now appear to be summoning greater reserves of courage than they previously seemed capable of.

If they continue to show that conviction, and express it openly, the media frame will change with it. The facade of Trump’s global dominance can crack, then shatter. As grim as the world looks right now, it seems a damn sight more hopeful than it did on Monday.

Odds and Sods

This week’s newsletter is once again available as a podcast, either on Spotify or at the top of the page, after last week’s tech disaster. I am now using my brand spanking new microphone, which I am alarmingly excited about, so hopefully it’ll all sound very late-night-jazz.

My column in the i paper this week was on that Carney speech I mentioned above. What a speech, really. I would strongly recommend you read it in full here or watch it below. I dearly wish we had anyone in British politics with the eloquence and vision to do something at that level. But given that we don’t, my main hope is that we follow Canada’s lead.

One of my first films this year was I Swear, a story about one man’s struggle with Tourette’s directed by Kirk Jones and starring Robert Aramayo and Maxine Peake. I will be surprised if I see a better film in the remaining 12 months. From the moment it started, I began laughing and sporadically crying. It is a properly beautiful film, bursting with empathy and human decency. It is funnier than any comedy I have seen for years.

Trust me when I say this to you: watch the film. Just watch it. No matter what mood you’re in. No matter what’s going on in your life. No matter how you feel about the world. Watch the film. It’ll make you a better person. It’ll remind you how kind people can be. And it’ll feature some of the best swearing you’ve ever heard.

Right, that’s it for this week - fuck off.