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Team Trump’s real feelings about Starmer’s Labour

From lagging defence spending to choosing Peter Mandelson as ambassador, the UK government is out of step with Maga.

By Jason Cowley

The sole Labour parliamentarian invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration was the maverick peer Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour. Glasman received his invitation through JD Vance, the new vice-president, and he also attended Trump’s pre-inauguration rally in Washington on 19 January in the company of Steve Bannon, who was the White House’s chief strategist in the early chaotic months of the first Trump administration and has since reinvented himself, after spending four months in prison in 2024, as a podcaster. Perhaps Gary Lineker will offer him a gig. 

As Glasman sees it, the three barons of Maga Square are Vance, Bannon and Elon Musk. Bannon, who has vowed to crush Musk – in part because Musk favours the H-1B visa scheme which attracts talented migrants to America – occupies the left side of Maga Square and Musk, the oligarch and transhumanist whom Bannon calls “truly evil”, the right. “Vance is more aligned to the Bannon side of the square but he’s being very well behaved and respectful,” Glasman told me. I asked him what the Maga crowd thinks of Keir Starmer’s Labour. “They love Brexit and want the UK to be their fundamental European partner but they’re not feeling it from London. They think the EU is a progressive death hole which is trying to ban the populist right in Europe.” 

During his trip to Washington, Glasman had a meeting with one “very senior member” of Trump’s new administration who, he said, had an uncompromising message for Labour: he wanted Starmer’s government to commit to spending even more of national income on defence and “align with the fundamental interests and values of the Trump administration. But he was having trouble seeing how it will work.” The choice of Peter Mandelson as the next UK ambassador to the US has not been well received among some of the Maga crowd. For Glasman, it shows Labour is not adjusting to the new political realities but reverting to the old. “Whenever Mandelson’s name came up, people showed me pictures of him out shopping with Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. “They see him as a truly hostile figure from the old order, an iconic progressive. What Labour needs to understand is this: the new era is bilateral not multilateral. They don’t want the rule of lawyers. What matters is national sovereignty: a negotiated order, not a rules-based order. But they think Labour is committed to globalisation and multilateralism.” 

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How quickly before the contradictions of Trumpism are exposed? Glasman likes to emphasise the “pro-worker” communitarian agenda of Bannon and Vance and their interest in Catholic social thought. But Trump is committed to aggressive tax cuts and deregulation and the Silicon Valley libertarians, big oil tycoons and billionaire oligarchs gathering around him are unlikely to have read Patrick Deneen or be swayed by common good-conservatism. What binds all factions of the Maga movement, however, is their contempt for progressivism or what they call “woke”. They believe Trump’s victory in November was not only a crushing defeat for the Democrats but for liberals and progressives everywhere. Viktor Orbán, the arch reactionary Hungarian prime minister, was correct to predict a new right-wing surge in Europe inspired by Trumpism, the aim of the second phase as he put it being to “occupy Brussels”. The surge is already happening. European nationalist populist parties and movements believe this is their time – and they were well represented in Washington.   

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The former Labour MP and TV grand inquisitor Brian Walden called Margaret Thatcher “a unique politician… the master spirit of our age”. Trump is not really a politician as Thatcher was but something similar can be said of him. He has an almost clairvoyant ability to channel the forces that are reshaping the world in this age of disorder. One can dismiss him as a “political idiot, a money-besotted businessman propped up by Musk” as Lee Siegel did in these pages last week, but the more interesting question to ask of the American president is: why does he keep winning? What is it that he understands about politics as an arena of raw power that his detractors do not? Perhaps they dismiss his seriousness and concentrate instead on his boorishness. 

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In her essay on camp published in Partisan Review in 1964, Susan Sontag wrote that camp is a vision of the world in terms of sensibility and style – “but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated.” For Sontag, “The hallmark of camp is the spirit of extravagance.” 

Genuine camp, she wrote, “does not mean to be funny”; she distinguishes between camp and the “vulgar” verb “camping”. “It is dead serious.” Trump is dead serious. He always has been. At the age of 78, he can speak for and channel the frustrations and yearnings of the ordinary American in a way Kamala Harris never could as she smiled and bounced alongside her showbiz pals during the election campaign. 

Trump’s inauguration speech was an exercise in camp – in style and sensibility – but he wasn’t camping as he promised to retake the Panama Canal, “drill, baby, drill”, and so on. His performance was exaggerated, extravagant and dead serious. So here he is: the master spirit of the age or a political idiot? The president to stop all wars or the harbinger of chaos? The world is being remade at a frightening speed as Trump signs his executive orders, withdraws America from the Paris Climate Agreement and threatens new tariffs against allies. In Britain, Labour can only look on fearful, repulsed and irrelevant as the march of Maga goes on.   

This appears in the 24-30 January 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine

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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex