Derangement is good for you

Bulletins from a French butcher's shop

I had occasion this week to consult my guide to invertebrate identification – you know: beetles, flies, moths, crickets and their creepy-crawly ilk. How rich in nomenclature, how redolent of poison and slime are so many of the species that accompany us, mostly invisibly, on our earthly journeys from dust to dust.

And then it struck me. My guide to the spineless could usefully include the creepiest and crawliest of all our planet’s creations. I’m thinking here of the Emperor Moth, the Assassin Bug, the Spittle Bug, the Snakefly, the Predatory Diving Beetle, the False Oil Beetle, the Scorpionfly, the Biting Midge, the Dung Fly, the Gall Wasp, the Wolf Spider, the Razor Clam and the Limacid Slug.

I’m thinking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Yes, I admit it. I’ve become a terminal sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I had intended to devote this column to my recent visit to Montpellier, an unusual city with a brilliant mayor who belongs to that scariest category of politicians summed up by Trump as “Radical Left Lunatics” (Mayor Michaël Delafosse is a socialist ecologist).

But I can no longer help myself. Montpellier will have to wait. I have tried to maintain a suave disdain for the bloated theatrics of the world’s greatest conman, but there comes a point when rational analysis needs to be tossed in the compost. There’s no point in humouring a Dung Fly.

Illustration: Cartooning for Peace

Here’s the thing. The rural wilds of the Jura mountains, on the edge of which our village was built 1,000 or so years ago, are a very long way from the darkening corridors and emptying car parks of Washington DC. So what does it matter down here how many American civil servants are fired by Elon Musk? When you’re retired and spending your summers paddling around the lake on an inflatable avocado, do you really care if US tariffs on China have gone up to 104%?

Whatever our neighbours may or may not think about Trump (and some of them are undoubtedly fans of Marine le Pen, France’s immigrant basher-in-chief) he’s not our only problem. We are currently worrying about a local sighting of processional caterpillars, a thoroughly nasty species that marches through the woods in nose-to-tail columns that Julius Caesar would have envied. The caterpillars are coated in stinging hairs that cause inflammatory reactions on human skin and are often fatal to dogs. Another invertebrate that sounds just like Trump.

Illustration: Robert Ariail

For a long time I resisted worry about MAGA. I even wrote a column a few months back suggesting that America might be better off getting Trump out of their system. I was convinced his second term would turn into a giant fiasco; that the Trump family’s flagrant self-enrichment at America’s expense – and the blinding incompetence of the idiots around him (Laura Loomer, national security genius, anyone?) - would eventually destroy his cult.

What I hadn’t bargained for was the US Supreme Court ruling that a president can do no wrong. By extending a blanket immunity to any action Trump might commit as president, the Supremes might as well have handed the keys of Fort Knox to Fredo Corleone. Trump can destroy America on a whim, and no-one can stop him.

He’s certainly having a good try, although I remain unsure as to how much of the chaos we’ve seen is likely to prove permanent or terminal. Trump has a distinguished record, when things look ugly, of declaring victory, blaming someone else and pretending that nothing ever happened. He’s already basking in supposed tariff triumph, a sure sign that they’ll be over by the end of next week.

So why should this matter to me in my remote and distant butcher’s shop home? Well, it doesn’t help that I’m the father of four American daughters, two of them living in America. When I visit them later this year, it appears I may have to delete this blog first in case a slug-eyed Trump minion at Washington’s Dulles airport checks my phone and happens to notice that I likened his dear leader to a poisonous caterpillar.

Furthermore, like every other ageing human lucky enough to possess a private pension fund amassed over several decades of employment, my chances of reaching my end in comparative comfort – ideally with a bit left over for the kids – have taken a giant Trump thump this month. The markets are plummeting, taking with them my retirement nest egg. I currently calculate that I shall have to die at least four years earlier than planned to keep enough cash in the kitty for the kids (that’s down from 105 to 101).

The real thing that bothers me, though, is something I’ve suspected ever since my short but eventful stint as the Washington correspondent of the Sunday Times (I took over in 2001, the year of 9/11, and spent the next four years writing about the war in Iraq).

For all Tony Blair’s efforts to throw British bodies at American targets, I never felt that the so-called “special relationship” between Washington and London was particularly special at all. It suited both sides to pretend to be close, but it was never clear to me that Britain enjoyed any status more privileged than Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, or on occasion even Italy or France. Yet successive British governments kept blindly consigning their eggs to a flimsy American basket and made no preparations for the day when an American president would tell us to fuck off.

To be fair, there were and probably still remain strong Anglophile cliques at high levels of American government. Condi Rice, George W Bush’s national security adviser would often relax by playing tennis on the British Embassy’s court. But the Clintons, especially Hillary, were deeply ambivalent about British sucking-up.

Bill was not a fan of the British government’s record in Northern Ireland and infuriated London by granting Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams a US visa. In later years, Hillary, who lived next door to the embassy but never popped round for tea, made no secret of her contempt for Tory governments (if only more of us had followed her example).

Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandfather was tortured by the British during the colonial-era Mau Mau rebellion. In his best selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, he devoted 35 pages to his grandfather’s story. Not long after he took office in 2009, nervous British pundits described him as “the least Anglophile American leader in decades”. Barack also kept reminding us that British forces once burned down the White House (in 1814). He was teasing us, of course, but he had little time for British pomp, his wife even less.

Photo: Anwar Hussein

On a personal level I remember the most difficult interview of my journalistic career – an acid encounter with Donald Rumsfeld, who was in charge at the Pentagon on 9/11. I was standing in front of his desk as he lambasted his staff for wasting his time on a British reporter. Why should he care what the British people thought of his war on Iraq?

Those undercurrents of animosity were mostly smoothed over by silver-tongued diplomats devoted to preserving the fiction of transatlantic harmony. But today those silver-tongued diplomats are out on their ears, courtesy of Musk, and loving the Brits is about as acceptable in Washington as a transgender toilet.

As the new regime has (accidentally) told us, they think we’re “pathetic”. And they are right. The ignominious collapse of a strategic policy of doffing forelocks to the White House might not have mattered had Keir Starmer taken over a British government with somewhere else to turn.

Instead the Brits have joined the long list of victims of the human version of the False Oil Beetle. Whether you’re a prime minister in London or an ageing pensioner in Montreal-la-Cluse, the best option now is to succumb to the warm embrace of Trump Derangement Syndrome. You’d be surprised how much better you feel referring to Trump and his enablers as Pubic Lice.

Illustration: @irregular goods

I’ll return to Montpellier in my next column. I won’t mention lice, I promise.