Our lot should learn from Trump

The political establishment, both home and abroad, hates Trump, and the feeling seems to be mutual.

The president seems to reject modern pieties. He may be unaware of some, and those he knows he doesn’t like.

They are indeed unlikable, but perhaps it takes a look from the outside to see that. And Trump is an outsider to the establishment.

Consequently he’s attacked by all and sundry with unrelenting vehemence. Even if I didn’t know anything about him, I’d be well-disposed towards Trump simply on the strength of the kind of people who sputter saliva at the very mention of his name.

There are more substantive reasons too, but, before I go into those, my requisite disclaimers first.

Trump exhibits many traits I dislike. He’s vulgar, narcissistic, brash, tasteless, too prone to look at complex issues strictly in mercantile terms. He thus wouldn’t be my choice of a dinner guest, but I probably wouldn’t be his choice of a host either.

Then of course there’s the Russian connection, the role it might have played in Trump’s election, and the possible quid pro quo Putin expects. Nothing criminal has been proved, but even the facts we know make me uneasy. Blowing through my mind like a wind through a draughty room are words like ‘smoke’, ‘fire’ and ‘Manchurian candidate’.

Trump doesn’t go out of his way to allay such fears. It took resolute action on the part of Congress to stop him from lifting richly merited sanctions against Russia, and so far he hasn’t said one word against Putin. Since the president is hardly taciturn, such silence may not speak louder than words, but it does speak.

Having thus absolved myself of any suspicion of favourable bias, I admit I like most things Trump does. I also like the inspiration behind his policies: unconcealed contempt for everything held dear by the kind of people who in Britain would be Guardian readers.

His refusal to accept at face value the UN hoax of anthropogenic global warming is commendable, and his consequent pulling of America out of the Paris Agreement even more so.

Currently in the news, as targets of the establishment’s venomous diatribes, are two other policies: his refusal to countenance the Iran nuclear deal (without, alas, cancelling it altogether) and his withdrawal from UNESCO.

During his campaign, Trump described Obama’s Iran deal as America’s worst in history. The 1945 one in Yalta is right up there too, but the Iran deal is indeed rotten.

It opens the way for the mullahs to acquire nuclear weapons and, in a country where ‘Death to America!!!’ and ‘Death to Israel!!!’ have replaced ‘Hello’ and ‘Good morning’, this has to be prevented at all cost.

Trump is way too soft on one evil state, Putin’s Russia, but at least he’s reasonably firm on two others: North Korea and Iran. Yet displaying such firmness punches a hole through the sanctimonious fog of virtual reality emitted by the ‘liberal’ establishment.

And then Trump pulled America out of UNESCO. Again, I like not only the act, but also the motivation behind it. Trump doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for multi-purpose international organisations, and they are indeed contemptible.

His gross mistake was to extend the same animus to NATO, which is neither multi-purpose nor really international. It’s purely a military bloc confined to Western countries or those aspiring to become Western.

Trump has said some silly things about NATO, although he had a point when complaining about America’s paying a disproportionate part of its budget. That’s a legitimate concern, although one could argue that pursuing ambitions of global leadership always tends to cost.

Anyway, either Trump has revised his views on NATO or at least he has been refraining from saying silly things about it. But his feelings about UNESCO – and no doubt the UN in general – are amply justified.

Actually, Trump’s decision simply puts an official stamp on the status quo. For the US and UNESCO have been going their separate ways since 2011, when Trump was still hustling Putin for property development contracts.

According to a US law, there can be no American funding for any organisation that accepts Palestinian territories as an independent member state. UNESCO did just that in 2011, thereby triggering the aforementioned law.

In 2013 the US lost its voting rights after missing several rounds of payments, and is now held to be in arrears. Hence Trump simply turned de facto into de jure.

On a broader issue, the US still pays 22 per cent of the UN’s budget, and plays host to that organisation’s headquarters. Unfortunately, even Trump isn’t brave enough to pull America out of the UN and expel it from New York.

But that would be a good idea. As a child of the League of Nations, the UN’s DNA includes an urge to create a world government, which is an old socialist dream. That’s why it consistently opposes the West, which isn’t yet completely socialist, if moving that way.

The inner sanctum of the UN, the Security Council, has five members, two of which are communist China and Putin’s kleptofascist Russia (née the Soviet Union). Its 10 non-permanent members currently include Bolivia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Senegal – a certain bias is evident, wouldn’t you say?

Essentially, all international organisations are useless and some are wicked, which is why our political establishments have a warm feeling of kinship for all of them.

The EU straddles both categories, useless and wicked, and hence it’s instructive to observe how our own establishment clings to it. Even those who are supposed to be institutionally committed to Brexit are trying to undermine it, and they don’t care how underhand their tactics are, or how idiotic the words.

Chancellor Phillip Hammond said the other day that we must prepare for ‘the worst case scenario’, such as that after Brexit there would be no more flights between Britain and the continent. He then generously allowed that such a development was unlikely.

Following the ensuing outcry, he swung to the other extreme by, inadvertently yet correctly, referring to the EU as an ‘enemy’. That’s like Hassan Rouhani describing Hezbollah the same way.

The political establishment is internationalist because it strives to increase the distance between itself and the people. This is both immoral and destructive, running as it does against the grain of traditional Western polity.

Knee-jerk internationalism is a virus Trump hasn’t caught specifically because he has never ventured into the infected area of the political establishment.

That’s why he has some healthy instincts, and our own politicians have much to learn from him. Not that they will, of course.