· Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
The Very Scary Truth.
‘Flood the zone with shit’. So advised Steve Bannon, onetime chief strategist for Donald Trump, who understood long ago that if you want to get away with an outrageous act, follow it with another and then another. That way, the media will be sure to move on to the newest horror, so forgetting the one before.
Trump continues to live by that rule, making it hard to keep up with everything he and his circle do and say – and he’s not even back in office yet. It therefore requires a conscious effort to take a step back and see what’s happening. That might be easier this week than others because the most egregious outrages form a pattern, one that poses a severe and direct challenge to Britain and its neighbours.
Start with Elon Musk’s war on the UK government, now increasingly explicit. On Monday the X owner, who sits at Trump’s right hand, leading his new, if not formally constituted, department of government efficiency, polled his 212m followers on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Naturally, they were in favour, by 58% to 42%.
It might be tempting to write that off as a joke, but it came in a blizzard of posts from, or amplified by, Musk, pressing the unfounded casethat Keir Starmer and his ministers are guilty of a cover-up of horrific child abuse by gangs of British Muslim men. Drawing on a series of distortions and wholesale fabrications long circulated by the far right, Musk has also called for Starmer to be jailed.
Lest this be construed as nothing more than a rich man having fun – some like yachts, others toy with the politics of foreign countries, each to their own – the FT reported on Thursday that “Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election.” He’s serious.
Pause for a moment to note how the same Brexiters who once insisted EU refrigeration standards for exported kippers, which turned out not to exist, were an intolerable violation of British sovereignty are now untroubled by a foreign oligarch openly engaged in overturning a British election – indeed, how eagerly the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have hitched a ride on Musk’s bandwagon. Nigel Farage is getting some credit for refusing to back Musk’s support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right agitator known as Tommy Robinson, but that’s self-preservation on Farage’s part – he knows that Robinson toxifies his brand.
None of that should distract from what this is: a deliberate attempt by the man at the side of the incoming US president to destabilise a loyal and longstanding ally. Those deluding themselves that Trump will respect the supposed special relationship between the US and UK need to absorb the fact that while Musk has been aiming his fire at London, Trump has raised not a murmur of protest.
And why would he, given that he too has spent the week destabilising an ally? Plenty thought Trump was kidding when he talked about acquiring Greenland, but not many are laughing now. He dispatched his son Don Jr to the island on Tuesday, as Trump explained that the US needed Greenland for its own security.
Trump knows that Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a US ally. But that doesn’t trouble him. Instead, he claimed the island “would love to become” a US state while threatening Denmark in the manner of a mafia boss running a protection racket. “We can’t be too happy with Denmark,” Trump said, not long before a New York court on Friday confirmed his status as a convicted felon,“and maybe things have to happen with respect to Denmark having to do with tariffs.” Nice business you got here; would be a shame if something happened to it.
It’s time we all got the memo. This is not how allies behave. Trump is acting instead like an enemy of the US’s historic partners, either threatening their security and sovereignty directly or indulging hostile interference in their domestic affairs.
The pattern of conduct by the Trump-Musk axis should be familiar. The torrent of lies, aimed at widening ethnic divisions and inflaming nativist nationalism. The determined control of media and information, already greeted in the US by a phenomenon that the eminent scholar of tyranny Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience”: witness Mark Zuckerberg’s craven ditching of factchecking in deference to Maga-world’s loathing of facts, or Jeff Bezos’s apparent resolve to neuter the Washington Post. The erasing of the boundary that should separate big business from the state, with plutocrats and government instead blurring into one. The dreams of territorial expansion.
Remind you of anyone? It’s a playbook written by Vladimir Putin, with Trump as America’s tsar and Musk as his principal broligarch. While the Russian dictator covets Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, Trump is eyeing up Greenland and the Panama Canal (and even Canada).
Putin’s agents meddled in democratic elections everywhere, including the US; now Musk does that job more overtly, whether it’s his vendetta against Britain’s Labour government or his enthusiasm for the German far right, demonstrated again on Thursday when he hosted an audio love-in on X with the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland party. As Bannon rightly remarked of Musk this week: “Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics – and he can deploy both at unprecedented scale.”
And just as Putin understood early that dictators flourish when citizens stumble in a fog of disinformation, and that there can be no accountability if the media are either crushed or discredited, so Trump once admitted to a reporter that he attacks journalists very deliberately, “so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you”.
The west took a while but eventually it came to understand the threat of Putin and, largely, united against it. Now the non-US west has to achieve a similar clarity and unity in the face of Trump and his own brand of authoritarianism, currently buttressed by the sugar-daddy of the global far right, Musk.
For Britain, this will not come easily. For one thing, UK prime ministers do not like being at odds with the US president and, when it comes to Musk, there’s little Britain alone can do. The answer is obvious, though not many in Westminster will want to hear it. The only body in this neighbourhood with the heft to stand up to Musk and his billions is the European Union. If Musk gets his way, and installs nationalist populist leaders in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, that may cease to be true. But for now, the EU is the only serious democratic counterweight to the Trump-Musk axis.
The richest man in the world has put a target on Starmer’s back and the most powerful man in the world has let it happen. If Starmer is to defend himself, and Britain, he will need allies – starting with those who are nearby and from whom we so recklessly walked away.
· Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
