Imagine if Theresa May had retweeted some clips from a sub-branch of the Ku Klux Klan with the words ‘These are good lads. Get on this.’ That’s the damage Trump has done now
I was going to keep it light this week, people, I really was.
It was fully my intention to write a jokey piece about the horror show that is the White House Christmas decorations. I’m assuming you all saw the photos?
It takes a lot to turn the concept of “warm festive celebrations” into “demented terrifying hellscape” but, all credit to her, Melania Trump managed it.
She turned a corridor in the White House into something out of a Tim Burton film: A long, bleak hallway, flanked with bare branches casting dark shadows onto the ceiling, ending in a distant Christmas tree that sent a glimmer of orange flames along the ground. It was like a portal to Hades.
So this was my plan on Tuesday – a kind of light-hearted look at Christmas decorations ending up with a slightly more serious point about how the Trumpian taste for all things cold and bleak reflected an inner coldness and bleakness.
Then, pretty quickly, things happened. He woke up, the Orange Sex Pest.
And soon nothing seemed jokey or light-hearted any more.
Trump woke up on Wednesday morning and casually decided to share some videos on his Twitter account.
They were videos originally posted by Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen, a lunatic right-winger who has already been charged with causing religiously aggravated harassment. The clips purportedly depicted Muslims assaulting people.
One of them ostensibly showed an immigrant assaulting a Dutch boy. It has already been discredited as fake by Dutch police, who made the point that it actually showed two Dutch nationals fighting.
A second video, entitled “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death”, was shot during the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Egypt in 2013.
The third, called “Muslim Destroys a Statue of the Virgin Mary”, was of notorious Syriann jihadist Sheikh Omar Raghba inn 2013.
The point is this: These weree dodgy videos custom-designeded to incite hatred.. The sort of thingg your racist cousinsin would share on Facebook with his 15 idiot mates.
And here theyy were, being promoted pr to 50million Twitter followers fo by the President of the United U States of America. Britain First, in case you need reminding, r is what Thomas Mair kept k shouting while he murdered British MP Jo Cox in 2016. The President had just handed an obscure British hate group a that “the President was wrong” to retweet Britain First), Trump took to Twitter to berate the PM, saying: “Theresa May – don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”
(Again, in the space of one sentence, Trump got quite a lot wrong: he tagged the wrong Theresa May and he seemed to forget the weekly mass shootings that take place in America.)
But the damage was done. Within 24 hours, odious racist Fransen was interviewed on CNN and NBC. There were people all over social media defending Trump. And there were millions more people who had heard of Britain First.
Most of these people – good people like you and me – will rightly be utterly disgusted by Britain First and all they stand for.
But there will be some, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, who think they have a point. Who think, like Trump, it’s time to get really tough. There might be one or two among them who, like Mair, decide there is only one way to do this.
Any blood they shed will be on Trump’s hands.
Incredibly, after all of this, the plans for Trump’s state visit to Britain next year remain in place.
It’s like if your uncle came to your house for Christmas and smashed the place up while shouting racist abuse and then you still asked him to be guest of honour at your wedding.
And you know what? I think we should let him come. I think the scale of the protests would be like nothing we’ve ever seen.
Tony Robinson, of Blackadder Baldrick fame, said he thought there would be “hundreds of thousands” of protesters on the streets if Trump came.
Me? I think you’re talking millions. I think London would be brought to a standstill. I think Trump knows this. I think he doesn’t want to come to Britain. He’s scared to come. Maybe, just maybe, he created this entire incident so he wouldn’t have to.
And I looked back sadly at my notes for my original column this week, that light-hearted look at Christmas decorations.
The Trump Christmas images had made me want to Google “Obama Christmas decorations”.
So I had. And had immediately been rewarded with tons of lovely photos of the Obamas and their kids smiling and laughing in front of cheerfully decorated trees, roaring fires and the like.
It was a powerful reminder of just what America lost when it decided to trade the former president in for the current one. It lost nothing less than its humanity.