The Cheese-Coloured Surrender Monkey

On Donald Trump, *that* meeting, and other obscenities

The Trumpster fire we saw in the White House on Friday seems to have set half the world alight. Europe must rearm starting right now… That’s the sensible call. So, I want you to go into your kitchen and grab the biggest knife you can find. I’m not writing another word until I know you can protect yourself from tiny North Korean infantrymen.

America, we also hear, has turned its back on Europe. I even heard one pundit suggesting that Donald Trump’s next move will be to rearm Russia.

Oh boy!

That last suggestion came from a founder of The Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson, who seems to have a good handle on all matters of US National Security, so who am I to disagree?

Yet I do disagree in one small detail.

If it weren’t so fucking scary, it would be indistinguishable from hysterical nonsense.

Make no mistake: what happened in the White House yesterday was despicable. It was craven, vulgar, and moronic. It was the single most shameful scene involving a US President to occur before cameras. Even on its most fundamental level, it was ungracious to a guest, as Real America’s Voice host Brian Glenn and boyfriend to “America’s dimwit”™, Marjorie Taylor Green, mocked Zelensky for not wearing a suit. Monkeys handed the score to Mozart’s Magic Flute would have done a better job of navigating the multipart harmonies than these bozos managed to handle the relatively simple moral choice before them.

You don’t invite a man into your home and demand that he prostrate himself on your carpet and lick the boots of President Fester whilst the sofa-fucking stepson lectures you with his post-coital whimsy.

Given all that happened, I understand where the panic is coming from and, hell, we have reason to worry, but as is usual with these moments of staggering stupidity, it’s all too easy to get caught in the backdraft of Trump’s political flatulence. Pundits tend to think in absolutes and it’s convenient for them to portray America as a homogenous entity; a single-cell bacteria floating out there in the middle of the sea. It’s true, as somebody pointed out yesterday – forgive me, it was one of those fleeting quotes I read on BlueSky – that America can never be trusted because you cannot trust a nation that turns on a dime every four years such that their enemies become their friends, their friends become their enemies.

But America is also not Donald Trump and that cheese-coloured surrender monkey is not America. It’s hard to imagine that many Russia experts in the CIA are particularly happy with this new turn to take Moscow’s side. Would America’s army really turn on old allies simply on the word of a senile President? Wilson also suggested that Trump might soon start to share intelligence with Putin. Possible, of course, but let’s see how that plays out.

Am I the only person sniffing the aroma of serious treason around Donald J. Trump? Might that not make it a dangerous route for politicians to follow? More than a few Republicans should be having qualms about stepping any further down that dark path.

Trump is also unique and events around him are one-of-a-kind. It’s difficult to say whether the planet’s entire geopolitical reality does turn around the whims of one man. America might not elect another treacherous fuck weasel like Trump for another two hundred years. Hard to imagine another miserable small-dicked spiv crawling up the greasy pole with such rapacious cunning and singular ineptitude. Within four years, he’ll be an indelible wankstain on the bedsheets of history, sooner if we have any fucking luck; a permanent reminder of what happens when America’s right hand is given too much cockpower.

Right here in the moment, it feels like we need to panic but I wonder how this will look over the broader course of history.

There has always been an isolationist bent to America’s sense of self. Hard to look outward when there’s so much to occupy it looking inward. And, absolutely, Europe should have already been looking to arm itself in ways that are reasonable given the threats. But let’s put those threats in context. Russia has an economy smaller than that of California. It’s the 11^th biggest economy in the world, dwarfed by those of the EU (plus the UK, which should, of course, still damn well be in the EU).

Putin’s Army has been unable to take small Ukraine (and has lost some Russian territory in the process) and, by some estimates, Putin’s army might not have lasted another year given the current rate of decline. Russia has been losing the war and might have lost it entirely had Agent Trump not now come to its rescue. Are we quite sure that the Russian army that couldn’t take Ukraine will now turn its sights on Poland and beyond?

That’s not an argument against rearmament because the UK armed forces have certainly been run down by successive Conservative governments who continually played the short game, maximising profits for investors over the good of the country. The story is the same across all sectors. The magic formula of competition in the market only lasted so long as new monopolies hadn’t formed.

Tories enjoyed the joy of free cash to those with enough money to buy up the private industries when they were offered but privatization did little to help the people beyond those asset-stripped the UK and ensured that we pay ever more for our water and power, sending dividends to investors abroad. Money that could have gone into defence is now helping plutocrats sail around the Med on their billion-rouble solar-powered twin-hulled brothels.

My sincere hope is that what we’re seeing now in America might well be the death rattle of the tech oligarchs in their most crass and self-indulgent form. We’ve lived under Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg for too long. Was it ever going to turn out well when Facebook began life as a way for college geeks to rate women? Did we ever really think these people might have a moral bone among them?

Every decision they seem to make is a bad one right now. Bezos has abandoned the notion of a free press in his latest communique about the future of The Washington Post. He spent more on his last wedding than he did buying the paper. He talks about defending people’s freedoms whilst ensuring his employees have less freedom in their day, monitored from entrance to exit by tight security inside the Amazon machine. Musk is, of course, exposing the federal government to his insane idea of unplugging every life support system to see if the patient survives without it. I think it will crash and burn relatively quickly. Predictions range from weeks or months to the end of the year. I’d be surprised if it’s still going in the summer.

Let’s see how the measles outbreaks develop, if bird flu jumps from cats to humans, and how America copes without FEMA when the next hurricane season starts in June. Let’s also see how many more jobs DOGE can cut and what happens when important services aren’t there when people need them. Let’s see what happens when all those people who voted for Trump because their eggs were expensive start to get fucking angry because they’ve had their healthcare cut and a plane has just fallen on their house…

I guess that we’ll see more protests on the streets. Republican Senators and Congresspeople will increasingly hide themselves away from voters until they can hide no longer. We might even see a few cracks in Congress, threatening the Republican majority on some key votes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Supreme Court doesn’t eventually hand down a few judgements that make Trump turn red around the edges of his orange spatula face.

Ultimately, I retain faith in the goodness of the American people, a huge majority of whom are no friends of Vladimir Putin. I don’t for one moment believe that honourable and patriotic Americans working inside the CIA will be sitting down at their desks on Monday morning and learning new ways to throw political dissidents from seventh-floor windows. Hard too to believe that Americans with roots in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Spain will be eager to turn their backs on those nations. Hell, even Donald Trump can’t do that.

This brings me to my last point: the people calling on Keir Starmer (or King Charles) to revoke the invitation they extended to Trump on Thursday.

Yes, they’re right. Donald Trump doesn’t now deserve it.

But you know what? He hadn’t deserved it on Wednesday. He hadn’t deserved it when he won back in November or back in 2016. He has never deserved that honour.

But this has nothing to do with “deserve”. It’s about the one (and perhaps only) point of leverage that Keir Starmer has over the American President. Did you see Trump’s face light up when he saw that letter? One piece of paper did a lot to boost our chances of avoiding Trump’s scattergun tariffs. I’ve never been the biggest monarchist – I’m pretty much a republican who accepts the silliness of a monarchy rather than ennobling a Beckham – but maybe they just saved us a shitload of money and earned their keep for the next two decades.

That’s why it was sensible to welcome Zelinsky to the UK today, wise to arrange an audience with the King. These things are symbolic. What Starmer should do is delay Trump’s visit, at least until the summer of next year, before the midterms, after which it’s hoped that Democrats will have retaken the house and finally curtailed some of this President’s powers. We have two years to support Ukraine, improve our defences without giving in to panic, and all the time wait for the Trump experiment to reach its natural end when the product of incompetence and mismanagement finally becomes more evident.

The bigger issues are beyond anybody’s powers to influence because they’re so fundamental, such as the fact that America’s political system doesn’t work and can all too easily be gamed. Having a Head of State who is also a political leader is a stupendously bad idea, especially when they have no viable means to deselect a President short of an assassin’s bullet.

America has elected a man who is treating his very small mandate as the right to rule as a dictator. They look like they’ll be stuck with him until 2028.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Americans do not have to stay silent and I don’t believe they will. America is slow to rouse, as the adage has it, but once roused, they fight tooth, claw, and nail for their freedom.

If you appreciate this post but don’t have the funds to subscribe, then please consider buying me a coffee. This is a coffee-fuelled blog. Unlike AI, I need my coffee! Also food...

buymeacoffee.com/davidwaywell

Follow me at:

Nerdling Bingo

or

DavidWaywell.bluesky.social