Newletter #8: The Trump wildcard

PLUS: A first look at the Shadow Cabinet; and some miscellaneous updates

Good morning.

Donald Trump won. The Woke have been defeated in America. But what about in Britain? Well, I guess we have Kemi Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet to be excited about…

This newsletter’s agenda: Trump Wins, Libtards Owned (free); The Trump Wildcard I: What about a US-UK trade deal? (free); The Trump Wildcard II: What about Ukraine? (paid); The new Shadow Cabinet: a first look (paid).

Trump Wins, Libtards Owned

At Pimlico Journal, we were ecstatic to see the election of Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States. What stared us down on Tuesday — an election we were told that was on a knife-edge — was genuinely nightmarish: four years of Starmerite abuse at home, while Kamala Harris celebrated the triumph of millennial ‘brat’ culture in the nation our ancestors built across the Atlantic. Trumpism was at risk of being written off as an aberration, failing in 2024 due to insufficient ‘post-liberalism’; too many tax cuts, and not enough welfare for the ‘multi-racial working class’. Instead, the Lion’s spirit has returned to the United States, with a crushing Trump victory that saw him sweep every single swing state and win the popular vote by a sizeable margin, no advice from Compact Magazine necessary.

Particularly exciting was his reported 13-point victory amongst young men. We now have electoral proof in the world’s most important country that yes, young men are moving to the Right. This will tremendously upset the Left because they view the delivery of ‘progressive’ politics as an act of torch-carrying on behalf of ‘the youth’. This is manifestly nonsense. With their healthy addiction to such platforms as TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter), young people have become politically unstable and mostly impossible to reach through the mainstream media. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the election, the Left’s soul-searching has focused on how to get young people to listen to a hypothetical Communist version of Joe Rogan. This wish-casting will achieve nothing, and the media diet of people in their twenties will continue to be poisoned by an onslaught of moaning about censorious, ‘cringe’ millennials now entering their forties. Never again will the Left be able to pretend that their Buzzfeed Instagram reels represent an authentic ‘youth culture’. For Britain, this means we have a counterweight to Keir Starmer that is not the useless Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch.

Hopefully, the Trump administration’s output will continue to spam the media ecosystem with debates over whether mass deportations of illegal immigrants or attempts to sack half of the federal bureaucracy are ‘wrongheaded’ and ‘unserious’. As our immensely tedious Government continues to enrage taxpayers with bans on fun and tax rises on the productive, the revolutionary Trump administration will provide fine fodder for the news-curious to debate policy on the most right-wing terms imaginable.

Even better: Kemi Badenoch’s useless leadership will be ignored: nobody will be remotely interested in her attempts to call Starmer ‘racist’; the media will instead remain fixated on the revolt across the Pond. Elon Musk’s colossal gamble on the purchase of Twitter has paid off, and the primary news delivery system for journalists and politicians has now become an arm of the most right-wing American government in decades. The censors in Britain will cry to Ofcom, demanding action be taken against Musk, but this is futile: the power of the chief censor of our wretched kingdom will have no ability to oppose Musk’s resolute commitment to international freedom of speech.

The morning of Wednesday 6 November will forever be remembered as one of the happiest political moments in our lifetimes. Remain ‘America-brained’: Trump roars back.

—Scott Goetz Deputy Editor, Pimlico Journal

The Trump wildcard I: What about a US-UK trade deal?

In its quest for a trade deal, Brexit Britain was repeatedly humiliated by Joe Biden, who never made much of an effort to hide his contempt for this country. The Democratic Party more generally seems to dislike Britain, partly because this country has become another aspect of the broader American culture war: the racist, imperialist past from without, rather than within.

The Republicans, by contrast, are much warmer to us, even if we should not exaggerate this: like all Americans, their opinions on Britain are (reasonably enough) still informed by a healthy dose of realpolitik; it is merely that discussions can at least begin on an even-footing — something that is impossible with most Democrats.

However, Donald Trump’s affection for Britain seems to go beyond that of the average Republican who has a vague respect for ‘the common law’. Recently, footage of Donald Trump lovingly going over his pictures with the royals during his state visit to the United Kingdom in 2019 went semi-viral. Trump, it should be remembered, has a Scottish mother, and has spent a lot of time in Scotland due to the golf course he owns in Aberdeenshire. This is not a new observation, but it is obvious that Donald Trump is not immune to flattery: Britain should respond accordingly when he visits. The Royals, for all my scepticism of them, are a genuinely useful asset in our foreign relations. People like the pomp and the legitimation from the ancien regime that they seem to give to those who visit. Keir Starmer needs to go out of his way to try to muzzle Sadiq Khan (though this might prove impossible).

Nigel Farage has emerged as a critical conduit in the relationship between the Government of the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s camp. Farage’s relationship with Trump seems to go beyond the merely formalistic, and beyond merely connections with lower-ranking associates, and up to the man himself and his family. He was recently pictured with Barron Trump. Reportedly, Trump’s camp questioned whether they should even bother meeting with David Lammy when Labour were in Opposition. It was apparently Farage who told them that they had to, because he would be the next Foreign Secretary. Farage’s repeated trips to the United States are not helpful for Reform, but they might end up being helpful for this country.

Farage has offered to be a ‘bridge’ between Labour and Trump, putting the national interest ahead of party politics (actually, from his own perspective, this might not be such a bad thing — the last thing Reform want is a Tory revival, which would be assisted by a Labour collapse on an issue like this). The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, has publicly rejected this offer, saying that ‘we’ll have our own relationships’ with Trump, and jibing that Farage has a ‘job to do in Clacton’. This was perhaps inevitable, given the childishness of the Labour backbenches, and the general reluctance of any Government to use an external ‘go-between’, at least publicly.

Privately, however, I think that Labour will be taking a rather different stance. Although Labour have been attempting to repair relations with Trump for some time now — given that their Foreign Secretary has called Trump a ‘a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ (that Lammy was ever appointed Foreign Secretary, in full knowledge that Trump might win, shows that Starmer is unserious, and that Lammy cares about his career more than the country) — this was all undermined by the activities of Sofia Patel, who enraged senior Republicans, and Elon Musk, by sending Labour activists over to swing states to campaign for Harris. Trump has even reportedly complained that Keir Starmer is ‘very left-wing’. As such, they will probably be doing all they can behind the scenes, given the negative political effect that a public breach in the ‘Special Relationship’ would have at home, quite apart from anything else.

There have now been a number of reports that Trump is interested in exempting Britain from his proposed flat global tariff (not that I think he will actually go ahead with the tariff — more likely it is a negotiating tactic at home and abroad). This is quite different from what we were assured by most mainstream commentators before the election: that Trump would in fact be looking to specifically target Britain, because we enjoy a healthy trade surplus with them. The realpolitik motivations from Trump’s perspective seem to be a desire to undermine the EU, which he views as an anti-American institution (probably because of the way in which their regulations seem to quite transparently target American firms), decisively pulling Brexit Britain away from it forever.

Will Keir Starmer’s Labour Party be willing to seize this opportunity, if it does arrive? It’s difficult to say. I think that ideologically, Starmer will be wanting to hew closer to the European Union. If given the choice, he would have no interest in pursuing a ‘Global Britain’, ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ strategy. However, pragmatically, I think Starmer already knows that this is not something that is likely to happen. Aside from domestic political concerns, the European Union is obviously tired of negotiating with Britain, and seems mostly happy with the deal that was struck in 2019. It knows that if Starmer is turfed out of Government in four or so years (something that seems more than plausible), it is likely that a new Conservative Government will want to rip up whatever he has negotiated. From their perspective, what’s the point? They just don’t have the energy for it; or, at a minimum, they don’t have the energy required to achieve anything tangible. Furthermore, an opportunity like this might only come once: the United States is not an instinctive free-trading nation. You need to strike while the iron is hot.

More of a problem is whether Starmer would be able to make the requisite compromises on such matters as ‘chlorinated chicken’ — easily worth it for a beneficial trade deal, but it will probably cause outrage on the backbenches. Expect rumbles about ‘selling the NHS’ from the usual morons. We shall see how Starmer reacts if Trump actually goes through with his (alleged) plans.

The Trump wildcard II: What about Ukraine?