Telegraph cartoon
Jeremy Clarkson: Who’ll take on JD Vance? Guess it has to be meShortly after Donald Trump flobbered into the White House for a second time, fizzing and glowing like he’d been freshly Tangoed, a number of famous American actors announced that they’d like to leave the country as soon as possible.
After Robert De Niro joined in the chorus, voicing his concerns about what life would be like under Donald, I very nearly called him. “Tell you what mate. You come and live in my house so you can enjoy all of the net-zero, hug-an-immigrant things that Kamala would have introduced, and I’ll live in yours under Trump. I know you only have 78 acres but I don’t mind. And then in four years when Starmer’s gone, we’ll swap back.”
In those heady early days, I liked the cut of Trump’s jib. He banned heavyweight boxing champions from taking part in schoolgirl competitions; he said that drinking straws made from paper “explode”; he said that oil and gas were better tools for making electricity than wind (he’s right: they are) and he launched a scheme which would send illegal immigrants to that jail in El Salvador where inmates are made to spend all day sitting on the floor in their underpants and if they want a drink, they have to lick the sweat off the back of the man in front.
But then came that White House meeting when poor little Volodomyr Zelensky was hauled in front of the world’s press and openly bullied in what, let’s face it, is his third language. Soon, the whole gang was at it, demanding to know why he hadn’t sent the people of America a thank-you letter and why he wasn’t wearing a suit. Had he not been thrown out after a few minutes, it’s fairly certain someone would have said his dad was a poof and that he smelled like wee and poo. Some have called this scene “an uncomfortable watch”. But it was worse than that. It was despicable.
And since then, things have got worse. Trump sided with Russia and North Korea in a United Nations vote on Ukraine. He pulled American military support completely and when various European leaders met to decide on how best to deal with this, JD Vance, the vice-president, scoffed, describing Britain and France as random countries who haven’t fought a war for 30 or 40 years.
Now I don’t want to stoop to his level, but I’m going to.
Vance is a bearded God-botherer who pretty much thinks that women who’ve been raped should be forced to have the resultant child. I’ve searched for the right word to describe him and I think it’s “twat”. He also has no clue about history.Because far more recently than 30 or 40 years ago, as Vance claimed last week, our brave young men were being blown to pieces in some godforsaken desert to support whatever madcap scheme the American president had embarked upon that week. And let’s not forget that while they were out there, dying in agony, the UK was still paying the US back for all the weapons we’d bought from them to defeat Hitler in the Second World War. In fact the last payment for all their “help” was for £43 million in 2006.
And while we are on the subject of the Second World War, let’s not forget that what Trump is doing in Ukraine is like Franklin Roosevelt saying to Churchill: “Look, Hitler has taken Poland so just let him have it.”
A lot of commentators are currently running around saying that this is exactly the sort of thing we should expect if we hand the reins of power to billionaires. Hmm. I know quite a few mega-wealthy people and mostly they are kind and normal and philanthropic. But there are a few who are shits, and I suspect that Trump and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin fall into this category.
They have it in their mind that because they are lucky workaholics — that’s all it takes to be a billionaire really — they are somehow better than other people. It gets to a point where they see everyone with less money than they have as a filing clerk. And if you end up running a powerful country, that warped logic applies to other nations. Who cares about what Greece thinks, or Latvia? They’re the world’s office boys.
So you’ve got Trump saying to Putin: “OK Vlad, you have Ukraine. We’ll have Panama and Greenland and Canada and next time you see Xi, let him know he can have Taiwan. And if anyone objects, they can eff off. And to make sure they really do eff off, we’ll hit them with trade tariffs, and you can cut off their gas. Golf next time you’re free? I’ll buy Spain and we can play there.”
I’d love to say at this point that I wrote about this exact state of affairs in a pro-EU column many years ago. I said the world needed a properly integrated and liberal United States of Europe, with one currency and one army to stand up to potential lunacy in Russia, China and America. Maybe that will happen now. I hope so.
But I fear it’s a pipe dream because, dear oh dear, I’m not seeing much Churchillian vigour from our current leaders. You’ve got Sir Keir Starmer fawning all over Trump, Nigel Farage parroting the White House line that Zelensky might not be the hero we once thought, and Kemi Badenoch saying that she knows Vance and that he didn’t say what he said. Except he did. We all heard him.
I sort of get it. There’s been a shock to the global status quo. There’s a maniacal bully in the White House, a killer in the Kremlin and Nato is on the brink of collapse. And no one dares say anything because Trump is the school bully and he’ll flush your head down the loo. It will take a week or two for us all to get our heads round that. But soon we are going to need someone who will rage and rage against the dying of the light.
In the meantime, I’ve decided that I don’t want to live in De Niro’s house. I’m staying in Chipping Norton.
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