Those around Trump see the old world of Western Europe as a tragic warning to America
Donald Trump’s dark and chaotic address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday seemed intent on insulting the maximum number of countries possible. Even so, he saved some of his most bilious words for Europe – and specifically for London and its Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who he has attacked for years.
“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor,” Trump said in his speech, as he spoke about the supposed overwhelming of Europe by foreigners. “A terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.”
Trump added: “Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately.”
In comments on Wednesday, Khan said he was “living rent free” in Trump’s head, and said the US President had shown himself to be racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic.
Khan’s team wouldn’t have been surprised by the verbal attack, since Trump has lambasted Khan and the city he leads many times before. Trump’s public expressions of grievance against Khan date back to 2015, when he was first running for President on a promise to put a “total shutdown on Muslims entering the US”.
But the wider American far-right has also become obsessed with the supposed decline of the UK in general, and London in particular, a preoccupation with far greater force than the shallow Islamophobia of their leader.
There is a long tradition of American right-wing Anglophilia. It expresses itself in all manner of ways, including Master’s degrees in conservative-friendly disciplines from the London School of Economics and St Andrews, a fondness for the words and war-faring of Winston Churchill, and a hybrid Oxbridge-Enlightenment-Scots Baronial aesthetic of gothic revival windows, Chesterfield armchairs and leather-patched tweed jackets.
This array of signifiers has been helpful for the far-right who have steadily wormed their way into respectable American circles in recent decades. It is the pose they’ve used to masquerade as ivory-tower intellectuals rather than crackpot extremists.
There’s an element of insecurity in there, too: surround yourself with the trappings of old-world intellectualism and perhaps they’ll convey upon you the gravitas that the world refuses to recognise.
Yet there is more to it than just posturing.
For people like Vice President JD Vance, the old world of Western Europe is a tragic warning to America. Give up your ideals of centuries past – even if misremembered – he and other Trumpist thinkers say, and you will be destroyed.
Two weeks before Trump picked him as his running mate, Vance declared in a speech that because Labour had won the 2024 election and Khan remained mayor, the UK was now “the first Islamist country with nuclear weapons”.
Inside Vance’s dark philosophy, it makes total sense.
At the same time, it’s a selectively-remembered Britain that tethers the US to the “Western civilisation” that the likes of Vance celebrate as intrinsically superior.
The story of America they tell themselves and their followers revolves around the myth that the core ethnicity of America is white, privately and publicly Christian, and originates, in large part, from a smattering of islands off the northwest coast of Europe.
The UK is often a target of American derision, but for the far-right it’s always going to be the US’s closest family member – as long as it doesn’t fail in its function as the redoubt of Anglophone whiteness.
Trump and Vance are sometimes called “isolationists” for their habit of abandoning countries to their fate at the hands of despots.
But the “America First” nationalism of Trump supporters might just as well be framed as “America Last” – the idea that the only relatives the US has left are dying of a terminal disease and leaving it no inheritance, and that all their country can do is save itself.
It can do this by rapacious exploitation, international bullying and booting out immigrants.
So why should it matter what the US President says about the UK or London at the UN, when his teleprompter supposedly broke? It matters because the UK has an apocalyptically-minded far-right intellectual class of its own. It is Trump’s carte blanche – or carte orange – that has given them the zeal with which they tout fevered fantasies of British suicide-by-multiculturalism.
For this British class of Trumpist nationalists, London’s supposed collapse into multiracial violence is everything, because if London can fall, what can survive? The Trumpist answer to that question is “America” – provided Trump can do what he likes with it.
