Roger Carey: To Donald Trump, From the United Kingdom

 This illuminating, chilling, and spot on piece is by my 

English friend Roger Carey, who I've known since 

high school. Excellent! Thank you, Roger! 

 — Molly

To
Donald Trump,

From the
United Kingdom

By Roger Carey

Well, Mr President. Since you sent your Wrecking Crew Boys over here, we Europeans now know where the world stands, when it comes to the United States.

At the other end — the very distant end — of the pitch.

I mean, on the one hand, we watch Musk and his shoulder-borne toddler hold that Oval Office press conference, and we know for sure this thing cannot hold for anything approaching four years. Especially when the nose-picking kid tells you to go away because you're not the President.

We could chuckle and sigh, and be glad we're not in the US, a federal employee, or gay, or an immigrant.

We worry a bit about your grasp of economics. This tariff thing is baffling. We understand you're all about revenge, and getting even and winning. Now you claim our sales taxes (VAT) are tariffs on products we import from you. They're
not tariffs, you idiot. They are just like your sales taxes. They're levied on just about everything one can possibly buy, in every country in Europe. Yes, they're around 20% in most countries. But they're not a tax imposed on specific imports
from anywhere, especially America. Who told you that was the case? Does anyone in the administration or the executive have any idea about world trade? Or Europe?

Then that brooding sunken-eyed hillbilly Vance, and his Crusader-cross-tattoed drunken womaniser sidekick army-jock Hegseth stop by. First we're told: it's over. Europe needs to look after itself. America can no longer do anything for us. We're on our own, to look after our own affairs for once. You're leaving us. You're moving in with Russia.

Then, in a world-first breach of good manners and diplomacy, your barely post-pubescent boys tell us how to run our countries. In all the decades of the trans-Atlantic alliance we have, on both sides, aided each other when called on —
sometimes reluctantly. We have given mutual support, and spared our criticism. We may have expressed wishes and hopes for policies and conduct, but no European leader has ever been rude enough or arrogant enough to tell the United
States how to run itself. Equally, even Obama restrained himself from telling the UK outright what he knew to be obvious, that voting to leave the EU was an act of possibly terminal national self-harm.

We had already experienced your batshit Musk calling for civil war in the UK, the dissolution of our corrupt government, and the release from jail of a convicted lying racist. But back then, Musk was a known loudmouth, seemingly operating alone. And we thought we had seen it all. 

But then the mountain throwback Vance steps in to do nothing more than trash Europe — about which he clearly knows everything — and everyone in it, piling misunderstanding on ignorance, at a time when the entire continent (and the
appendage of the British Isles) is under perhaps the greatest threat of war and destruction since 1945. Then he moves on to spread falsehood after falsehood about free speech and authoritarianism in the UK. Silent prayer in our own homes is a criminal offense in the UK? He claims religious freedom in the UK is "in backslide"?* What is this lunatic smoking?

And next, your boys bounce around Europe, like they're on some expenses-paid dope-addled student gap-year trip. And they really up the geopolitical meddling. They're telling us how you've arranged the capitulation of Ukraine, how Ukraine cannot be a member of NATO (hold on here, 30 of the 32 NATO member states are in Europe, and might have a view on this), how Ukraine and the rest of Europe will make concessions to Putin, while Ukraine and Europe will not be a party to the discussions, and Putin need not make any concessions at all. Then, these dumbass dimwits of yours go on to explain the settlement terms, before even arriving at the negotiating table (I looked. I couldn't find that anywhere
in The Art of The Deal). No, you won't be discussing those settlement terms with the nation he's settling on behalf of, nor will any European country be invited to provide any help, at the same time as saying the US can no longer be involved with Europe. A place about which almost everyone in Washington seems staggeringly, blindingly, blunderingly ignorant.

Here's your blond cutie press secretary banning journalists from the White House press room because they refer to the water south of Texas as the 'Gulf of Mexico (also known as the Gulf of America)'. The White House Press Secretary said journalists do not have the right to ask questions of the President, and they won't be invited to do so unless they use the words you demand they use. That is indeed what she said, and certainly what she meant. Do not question the President. Use the words he tell you to use. Or else.

And an antivaxer consipracy theorist is now in charge of American health. One is left fluffing, floundering and gasping, groping for words that could begin to express the baffling incomprehensibility of such an entirely dazzlingly stupid appointment.

This is all beyond weird shit. This is starting to scare people over here. A bunch of certifiably crazy people are stirring up unrest and insecurity across the continent of Europe, for reasons we cannot begin to understand. Your boys lecture us about loss of freedoms, the end of free speech, the rise of authoritarianism, while proudly and brazenly practising all those evils themselves in your own country. 

We don't get it. Do you actually want to destroy the centuries-old wonky but workable versions of democracy we have here? Where in that is there a benefit to you? Are our laws and our principles of government somehow stopping America becoming Great Again? Do you really want to bring down intelligent leadership, destroy rules-based societies, and instead fuel a bunch of warmongering dictators, just so you can sit back and watch the fun? Do you not understand that this will only end in tears for you as well as us?

My 5 year-old grandson has a better sense of geography than Musk, Vance, Trump and Hegseth. My 13 year-old granddaughter has a clearer view of geopolitics than they do. My cat has a better sense of moral decency than you and your Chuckle Brothers envoys to Europe.

You said you want mineral rights in Ukraine. That way, you said, 'we get something back. We don't look stupid'. And this is your world. The warped world we all now inhabit, whether or not we voted for you. Or even had a vote. A world
in which, if you give someone something without asking for anything in return, you're just stupid. So said you, the man leading an army of Christian nationalist fundamentalists. Who published his own Bible. 

If you and your band of Merry Madmen have simply given up caring about good relations with Europe, or anywhere else in the world, that's OK with us. We'll be fine, thank you. But if you want to send your lying, philandering, racist, sneering bully-boys over here just for the hell of it, or to shatter things into pieces just because you don't like them or don't understand them, at the expense of my children and grandchildren? Well, then, my friends, you will have a fight on your hands.

You started it.

 

*Vance is a fine one to be a critic of shortcomings in religious freedom.