On Monday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as US president, bringing with him a whole bevy of MAGA extremists, tech-bro disruptors and a defence secretary who’s been denounced by his own mother. The hyperpower is on course to be ruled by an administration whose best members can be described by the “marginally more normal” label of “traditional Republicans”.
We knew this was coming, of course – have had ten weeks to get used to it – but there are some things one can’t really prepare for, and it turns out that “wondering each morning whether the US president is joking about his desire to just absorb someone else’s sovereign territory” is one of them. Apart from anything else, we’ve been here before, and history is not meant to go into reverse like this.
And it will not be possible to just ignore Trumpism, no matter how far removed from Greenland or Panama you are. Twitter was a minority sport, making the descent of Elon Musk consequential but possible for most people to ignore. By contrast, over 3 billion people use a Meta product – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram – every day, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is busy rewriting the sites’ policies to accommodate the new reality. That’s without even looking at the fact that the looming US tariffs mean the the World Bank is already slashing its global growth forecast. When the US sneezes the world economy catches a cold; Trump’s economic policies amount to giving it norovirus.
All this is already having an effect back in Britain, where rising bond yields are imperilling Rachel Reeves’ already bleak budget projections, and a government elected in large part because public services were on their knees is now poised to cut them further. (I was going to describe this as “round X of austerity”. I didn’t because I honestly couldn’t work out what “X “should be.) All this has raised questions about the Chancellor’s future, because nothing reassures jittery financial markets better than a panicked decision to sack your finance minister. If that doesn’t do it, perhaps more swinging cuts to disability benefits will.
Labour is not the only political party at risk of unexpected personnel changes. Kemi Badenoch’s big relaunch speech has proved very popular with the sketch writers (“already out of ideas”; “lots of policies, they just go to another school”), but not so much with anybody else. No matter: if that doesn’t convince wavering voters, her suggestion that we means test pensions surely will. And now, Reform is edging ever closer to topping the polls for the first time. The only comfort to be taken from the increasingly plausible prospect of Prime Minister Nigel Farage is the lingering suspicion that he’s as terrified by the prospect as we are.
But looming over it all is the biggest crisis of the lot. In 2024, the global average temperature passed 1.5C above the pre-industrial average for the first time, and CO2 levels hit a new high. Large chunks of Los Angeles have dramatically illustrated the threat by spending the new year thus far on fire. Climate catastrophe won’t care how rich you are.
It’s tempting to say that this could render all those other problems irrelevant, in roughly the manner that a massing horde of ice zombies could rather overshadow the question of who sat the Iron Throne, but the truth is more frightening still. Climate crisis will mean economic crisis, and tens of millions of refugees. You think the nasty right is booming now? Just you wait.
Eight years ago this week, someone then very dear to me told me that they were “seriously thinking about becoming politically disengaged”. We’d just lived through Brexit, and what we now must refer to as the first Trump victory, and could do very little about the rolling political crises on either side of the Atlantic. Helplessly watching them unfold meant sacrificing your mental health, for very little benefit.
I have more than a little sympathy. But as Leon Trotsky is purported to have said about conflict, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The same, I fear, is true of 2025. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
[See also: How will Labour handle Trump 2.0?]
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