Contempt for human rights, trashing allies: the world’s populists are rubbing their hands with glee | Simon Tisdall

Feelings are not the usual focus of a world dominated by macho strongmen, complex geopolitical challenges, wars and disasters. Yet every rule has exceptions. Following Donald Trump’s unexpectedly decisive US election victory, dark storm clouds seeded with powerful emotions overshadow the international landscape.

Feelings of shock and anger that this lying conman again seduced enough voters to win the presidency roil America’s friends and allies. There is incredulity that so very many people collaborated in their own seduction. And there is puzzlement at exit polls that show 45% of female voters backed a serial sexual predator while Latino and black men helped a shameless racist to prevail.

Of all these emotions, fear is perhaps the most powerful. Fear for future generations who will suffer the consequences of Trump’s actions. Fear that millions of young people who care deeply about the planet may inherit a dying world of mass extinction and ever more lethal droughts, floods and heatwaves. Fear that Trump unbound – godless, corrupt, immoral and self-worshipping – will be all our undoing, ethically as well as politically.

And there is a huge sadness, too, that present-day generations in the west have let this happen, have been so complacent, so feeble, so negligent in defence of their ideals and values that a neo-fascist yob like Trump can subvert the world’s leading democracy. As with Brexit, another yob’s job, the morning-after feeling of failure is acute.

It would be comforting to think, when contemplating the “trump of doomsday” (to quote AE Housman’s poem, A Shropshire Lad), that Trump #2 will not be as bad as advertised. An unconvincing political firewall is already under construction as “hearty congratulations” and similarly disingenuous, upbeat messages are dispatched across a widening Atlantic by Keir Starmer and worried EU leaders.

It would be nice to feel something positive might emerge from Trump’s plans to scrap multilateralism, rebuild Fortress America with tariff walls, go ape drilling for oil and gas, appease thuggish dictators and extend government controls into private lives. It would be good to believe that in victory, he will show magnanimity. Dream on. All the signs are that Trump’s second coming will be more wantonly, recklessly, lawlessly destructive than ever.

Measured in conventional geopolitical terms, gifting Russia’s Vladimir Putin a strategic triumph by imposing a “peace” settlement on Ukraine, as Trump proposes, would undoubtedly set a dire precedent. In such a scenario, brute force prevails, the UN charter is shredded, national borders are changed by diktat. Neighbours such as Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, even Poland and Finland, will wonder: who’s next? So, too, will a stricken Nato.

Yet the impact of Ukraine’s betrayal at a human, emotional level could be potentially more devastating still. What to say to the families of 30,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers? How to explain their cruel abandonment to millions of pro-western civilians? And who in the world, in Taiwan and elsewhere, would any longer feel they could trust Washington’s word?

Or take the Middle East. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his gang of religious zealots, bigots and fruit-cases will seek to exploit Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias. They are pushing to annex much of the West Bank and Gaza and seize control of a chunk of south Lebanon. If backed by the US, such a policy guarantees perpetual Middle East warfare.

But beyond that extremist agenda lies a benighted hinterland full of human pain and suffering. The death toll in Gaza since 7 October 2023 now exceeds 43,000. Casualties are rising rapidly in Lebanon, too. Of 100,000 injured in Gaza, many are children, many severely traumatised, many orphaned. When they grow up, assuming they survive, how will they feel? Hatred for Israel and America hardly begins to cover it. As in Ukraine, Trump’s plans will not advance “peace”. Instead he will set timebombs ticking for the next big war, maybe with Iran.

Trump’s demonisation of migrants as pariahs and criminals, regardless of status, appealed to voters’ worst instincts. It sent pernicious, potent subliminal racist messages. The hostile feelings subsequently stirred up among the resident population, ranging from violent rage to normalised discriminatory attitudes, may now persist and intensify.

Yet that suits Trump. It will help him pursue his promised mass deportations of up to 11 million “illegals” by corralling families in huge detention centres, effectively concentration camps. If such people are depicted as a threat and as lesser human beings, it’s easier to abuse and mistreat them. And if he does it, so will others.

Trump’s broad disrespect for human rights, especially women’s and trans rights; his disdain for democratic checks and balances; his unilateral trashing of alliances and treaties (be it Nato or the Paris climate agreement); and his criminal contempt for laws, domestic and international, are behaviours that will be emulated globally. Rightwing populists in Latin America, Europe and the UK lap it up. Would-be copycats abound.

Trump, meanwhile, fully reciprocates the fury felt by opponents at home and abroad. Touchy-feely, not so much; but Mr Angry? Yes. Desire for personal retribution and revenge obsesses him. And this is the crux. Trump is propelled by passion, not policy. For him, politics is primarily about emotional responses. He’s not rational, as discussed here last week. He’s impulsive, instinctive, visceral. It’s about gut and whim “d’you feel me?”.

To make America great again, Trump is preparing to re-make the world in his vile image, by disrespecting, demoting and diminishing democratic allies (like Britain) and sucking up to the like-minded authoritarian leaders he is most comfortable with. If it makes him feel good, then to hell with everyone and everything.

Coming very soon to a cinema near you: Trump #2: How the West Was Lost.