The US’ oldest-ever president prepares to take office and the brakes are off the wheelchair, says Fleet Street Fox. This is government by whoever he’s just seen on the telly
There will come a day – not long from now – when we will pine for the calming tones of an all-caps tweet sent at 7am from atop a golden toilet.
The random policy decisions, the mood swings, and the arbitrary punctuation of Donald Trump’s first term will appear, with the rose-tinted glasses of time, to have been the high point of 12 years in which the world has been dominated by a man whose mind is even smaller than his hands.
Because, as of January, Trump will attempt to place in government a) the most capricious megalomaniac in history b) a self-confessed dog killer and c) someone who in any normal world would be either behind bars or in a padded cell. And this time, they’re not his relatives.
It’s not a government of ne’er do wells, or oddities, or even people who could get gainful employment as circus freaks. This is a government of whoever the World’s Worst Toddler just saw on the telly, without really caring WHY they were on it.
In charge of justice, theoretically at least, is Matt Gaetz, a man whose face and morals both resemble the mess you’d get if you left Jack Nicholson on a radiator overnight.
He is about as far to the Right as is possible, for a Trump-era politician in America, without actually strutting about in jackboots. The people of Florida have elected him to Congress five times, despite the kind of public behaviour which a pantomime scriptwriter would reject for being too far-fetched.
Accused of witness tampering by using Twitter to undermine testimony against Trump before it was given, he also claimed the Capitol riots were led by Trump opponents, admitted unlawfully using taxpayer funds, and employing a convicted murderer as a military aide. Under investigation for allegedly having sex with a minor, trafficking her across state lines, using fake IDs and paying escorts for sex via a Florida tax collector who turned state’s evidence, he was never charged with a crime for a lack of believable witnesses.
Two days before an ethics report was due to be published into the whole disgusting affair, he quit to become Trump’s Attorney General – overseeing all matters of US litigation, and advising the president on, one assumes, how to get away with s***.
Meanwhile, a father of 11 who cannot settle down to one job and has had at least $15.4billion out of the public purse has been put in charge of government efficiency.
How Elon Musk will have time to refine a massive bureaucracy when he spends all his time screwing up Twitter, making cars that catch fire and rubbing himself against rockets is unclear, but presumably it will involve carrying bathroom china around like an asinine pun made flesh.
He will have an incentive though – it is that bureaucracy which is suing or enabling him to be pursued legally for Tesla plant emissions, Space X spillages, systemic racism in his factories, executive-level shares chicanery, fire safety, autonomous car safety, civil rights violations, and a woman pinned to her garage wall while 8 months pregnant by a car which allegedly acted of its own accord.
Seeing as Tesla and Space X are and have been dependent on federal funding, it is highly likely the the Department of Government Efficiency which Musk himself demanded because the acronym is the name of his favourite digital currency will be little more than a billionaire’s plaything, used to enrich himself and screw everyone else.
Finally – well no, there’s a list of these headbangers a mile long but three is all I have the patience for – is Kristi Noem, a South Dakota governor with the face of a mid-Noughties Katie Price and the mind of a dumper truck.
She was banned from entering 20% of her home state after infuriating its indigenous tribes, and bragged of her two-year-old granddaughter owning a shotgun. But she really got famous by shooting her 14-month-old dog Cricket because she couldn’t train her, even though she’d tried an electric shock collar. “I hated that dog,” she wrote in a memoir that nobody wanted to read. She’s now in charge of Homeland Security.
Dip a hand into the Trump cesspool and you come back out with a melted Joker, a paranoid android and a dog killer. And even parking the bizarre nature of current US politics for a moment, the reason they are all in Trump’s Cabinet is not for achievements or skill but because he saw them a lot on Fox News.
He did not notice that they were on the telly because they were awful, nor that they were accused of crimes, moral failure, or even being an embarrassment to the nation in general and Republican Party in particular. It is just that the US has a president who governs on the basis of what he just seen on the TV, and he mostly watches the Bats*** Crazy channel.
This is what Keir Starmer must navigate, like a human rights barrister given the task of babysitting a three-year-old terror during a Ritalin shortage. It’s what we all must live through, somehow, as we watch the greatest superpower the world has ever seen turn into the United States of Assholes.
The solution, luckily, is obvious. The first clause in the UK-US trade deal must be for CBeebies to be broadcast 24/7 Stateside, because only Hey Duggee can save us now.
