Trump Trip Truths

I don't half get around. I recognised people on both sides of the gates of Blenheim Palace last night. 

And I was going to write that, although he could have a British passport if he wanted one, a foreign national who cost us this much to protect ought not to be allowed to come here at all.

But no. The reaction to the demonstrations against Donald Trump is serving as a useful illustration of why he won. The Establishment treats all dissent as seditious, and any protest as potentially insurrectionary. 

I can tell you for a fact that the poorly accommodated Police Officers who have been seconded to this pantomime are more likely to take to the barricades than the protesters are. 

Those entirely peaceable people largely agree with Trump about the global economic and strategic order. Their candidate for President of the United States would, of course, have been the man who would have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders.

Sanders stands in the tradition that, in the countries in which it has enjoyed some electoral success and quite considerable political influence (Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, the Benelux), is known interchangeably as Social Democracy and as Democratic Socialism. 

While it would have had to have been called something else in the United States, perhaps "Soccer", nevertheless it is where American politics from the New Deal onwards would have ended up if Ronald Reagan had never happened.

Indeed, in the broadly Scandinavian form advocated by Sanders, it is economically to the right of every Conservative Government in Britain since the War, including the present one.

That raises an interesting question. Sanders has brought into political life, and to prominence within it, people who are well to his left and who are considerably younger than he is.

In the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020, will he be outflanked by them on both counts? Or will he turn to his advantage his relative moderation and his vast experience?