Is Trump Expendable? by Les May

I’VE never bought into the idea that Labour losing last year’s General Election was because a Corbyn led government’s policies made it ‘unelectable’. I think a more plausible explanation is that Labour’s so called ‘Red Wall’ crumbled because those voters wanted ‘Brexit’ and knew that Johnson would deliver it, but Corbyn couldn’t be guaranteed to. The intervention of a Brexit party candidate in my constituency effectively helped to defeat Labour.

Those who voted Tory at the last election came from two ‘tribes’, each of which spoke their own language, had their own values and were incomprehensible to each other. One was the tribe which always voted Tory; the other was the tribe made up of those who usually voted Labour, or not at all, but who for their own reasons simply wanted to leave the EU.

Britain will leave the EU on the last day of the year. Job done! Why vote Tory next time? Boris Johnson knows this, that’s why he is so eager to push his ‘levelling up’ agenda which seems to me no more than a rebranding of the old ‘trickle down’ economics of Margaret Thatcher.

Donald Trump’s sojourn at the White House came about because two ‘tribes’, incomprehensible to each other, put him there in 2016. One tribe was drawn from Americans whose livelihoods were threatened because the industries they worked for were losing ground to cheaper foreign imports or were simply past their sell by dates like coal production, the inhabitants of the so called ‘rust bucket states’. The other tribe was composed of socially conservative, for which read abhors homosexuals, same sex marriage and abortion, devout, Bible immersed, fundamentalist Christians. Trump knew exactly what he was doing selecting Mike Pence to be his Vice-President. Pence is the real deal. At the end of the first meeting between the two he suggested they hold hands for a short prayer.

Trump now faces the same problem as Boris Johnson. He’s delivered a Supreme Court bench with a built in conservative majority which could last for the next thirty or forty years which his Bible bashing supporters can reasonably expect to deliver the sort of socially conservative rulings they want to hear. Job done! Why vote for an ersatz vulgarian like Donald Trump when you can have the real deal in the shape of someone like Pence in four years time?

The smart money is on Trump still being a major force in the Republican party in the next four years. I’m not so sure.

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