Even at their best, Donald Trump’s tweets – disjointed, jabbering and ungrammatical as they are – have the nonsensical ring of spam email. Now he has augmented his general talent for idiocy with a more specific trick. It’s one that will gladden the heart of so many British people who seek his counsel, and who wish they didn’t have to do at a foreigner’s remove: desperate as ever for a new target to have a frothingly weird pop at, he has turned to us.
The United Kingdom is trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem. Everybody is wise to what is happening, very sad! Be honest.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2015
Pausing only to hurl rocks in vain at the Massive Muslims crushing their homes underfoot, British people everywhere, struck by this piercing diagnosis of their country’s social problems, turned to Trump for a solution.
Happily, it came in two further tweets.
Thank you to respected columnist Katie Hopkins of Daily https://t.co/LgtY0qdv9U for her powerful writing on the U.K.'s Muslim problems.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2015
And then:
The politicians of the U.K. should watch Katie Hopkins of Daily https://t.co/LgtY0qdv9U on @FoxNews. Many people in the U.K. agree with me!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2015
Those moments don’t come very often in a lifetime: when someone says something so insightful, so perspective altering, that nothing quite looks the same again. In this world, where respected columnist Katie Hopkins has a hotline to nonracist presidential candidate Donald Trump, Birmingham is a “totally Muslim city” (as one of his fellow-travellers had it).
In this world, London’s police officers cower in fear any time they find themselves out of sight of Scotland Yard. In this world, British people agree with Trump, rather than mostly just think of him as the American Alan Sugar in a wig.
In this world, we may hope that one day Hopkins will enjoy the same unquestioned authority that he does. She will be our discount dictator, perhaps, when her permatanned, pouting overlord has annexed us as a puppet state.
Sometimes, I guess, it takes an outsider to see you the way you really are. It takes an outsider to realise that all those mysterious giants are Massive Muslims in disguise. It takes an outsider to realise that what Scotland really needs is to be carpeted in golf courses. It takes an outsider to realise that The Apprentice can spew out a real thought leader, with blonde hair genuine or artificial.
Donald Trump’s re-engineered Britain is a fascinating, if unfamiliar, place. But on the whole, I’m glad I don’t live there, even if it might be nice to have the Loch Ness monster poking his head out of a water hazard.
Consider this, though: when Trump fires off one of his swivel-eyed fantasias and directs it at us, at least we can console ourselves with the thought that it could never really happen. Americans have to contemplate the possibility that he could actually make it so.
