History of the Present (10 days to 25 April 2026)
According to the constitutional calendar, Donald Trump will be president of the United States for another 1000 days. How can we survive them?
‘Ignore him’ sounds like ridiculous advice, since we’re talking about the most powerful man in the world. But maybe there’s something in it.
First of all, it’s seriously bad for one’s personal mental health to pay attention multiple times a day to the bullying, wild, ridiculous and stupid things that pour out of his mouth, like sewage from a broken drain.
What the malign narcissist Trump craves above all is attention – so let’s deny him it.
’But what he says matters’, the media respond. Increasingly, though, as his statements become ever more erratic, incoherent and self-contradictory, even within the same paragraph, there’s a real question whether there’s any empirical value to paying attention to every passing Trump dump.
‘Listen to what they did./ Don’t listen to what they said.’ Thus James Fenton in his poem ‘Blood and Lead’. Always good advice, but particularly in this case. Imagine a news outlet adopting a new editorial guideline: only report what Trump has actually done. ‘President Trump said many things today, but the reality is that the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked by both Iran and the US.’ And so on. Would we be any less well informed?
Ignoring him can also be a policy. Europe is already close to it on Ukraine. Of course European leaders keep talking to Washington and making positive noises. But whatever Trump’s emissaries say to their friends in Moscow, Europe goes on supporting Ukraine economically and militarily. Most recently, the fall of Orbán in Hungary (see my last History of the Present) has unblocked a cool €90 billion, most of which will go to pay for weapons produced by Ukraine’s own defence industry.
It’s fiendishly difficult, obviously. The intelligence and targeting information only the US can provide, the US-manufactured Patriot interceptors that are the only things that can effectively stop Russia’s ballistic missiles (and are now being used up in the Gulf) – these are hard to replace. But if Ukraine can hold off Russia for four years against all the odds, so can we keep Ukraine in the fight.
What about defending EU-Nato Europe against Russian attack if, as Polish prime minister Donald Tusk frankly acknowledged the other day, we can no longer rely on the US to come to our aid? That’s even more difficult, given the way Nato depends from top to bottom on US command-and-control, strategic enablers, extended nuclear deterrence etc etc. But in Berlin last week, I found very senior people saying privately for the first time that that’s exactly what we have to do. By hook or by crook, we need to make it credible in the mind of Vladimir Putin that Europe on its own would be ready and able to defend Narva in Estonia, or an island in the Baltic, or a frontier area in Bulgaria or Romania.
So here’s the third and highest stage of ignoring: after 1. not listening to anything he says (only to what he does), and 2. doing what you think right and in your interest in spite of him, comes 3. working to put yourself as fast as possible in a position where you can ignore the most powerful man in the world in areas where currently you can’t.
I’ve looked at this from the point of view of Europe, but one could do the same exercise everywhere else, from Asia to Latin America.
It’s more difficult, admittedly, to do it inside the United States. But even there, a state like California has many possibilities to do things in spite of the president, using the possibilities given it in law by the federal system and in reality by its economic and technological power. Ultimately of course, after the midterm elections in November, especially if the Democrats control both the House and the Senate, they will have to constrain him, resist him and impeach him. But we can’t afford to wait until then.
This is not a fully developed policy prescription, obviously, just a thought to chew on this weekend – and maybe give you hope for surviving the next 1000 days… Best, TGA
