Today I glanced through my Guardian, enjoying the lack of adverts since my recent return to the fold with a renewed subscription. It was Hobson’s choice – I must have access to at least one mainstream newspaper, to gauge how it compares to news from other sources.
The Guardian pays its journalists and some of its in-depth reporting is excellent. The long running series on the slave trade a few years back was exemplary. I’m still banished from the comments page, after the, er, late unpleasantness of 2021, but I’ll just have to suck that up.
Mainly, I read it for a handful of its columnists: Marina Hyde, John Crace and Zoe Williams for laughs; George Monbiot, Jonathan Freedland, Aditya Chakrabortty, Simon Tisdall and a few more for the serious stuff. Marina Hyde is one of the few journalists who can make me laugh out loud. She helped me get through Covid by hilariously and repeatedly puncturing the dirigible of hot air and bullshit that was Boris Johnson – John Crace too.
Today, there is a column by Martin Kettle; his final regular one, on his retirement from the newspaper after 41 years. Here is its headline: “The world of today looks bad, but take hope: we’ve been here before and got through it – and we will again”. Oh dear, I thought.
Here are two sentences from the final paragraph: “We should rally behind politics, not turn away from it. I hope that necessity will once again drive politics on the kind of process that emerged after the 1980s.”
In his piece, Mr Kettle likens the world we live in now to the Britain of the 1980s, with the tearing of its old social fabric and a dawning realisation that it was no longer a power on the world stage. The trouble is, his chirpy assurance that we have been here before and we can get through it again is nonsense; the world has not been where it is now since 1939. The truth is, no-one knows whether we can get through whatever this is to some sort of tranquility.
I wish Mr Kettle no ill and I hope he enjoys his well-earned retirement, but it is journalism like this that drives young people away from the mainstream press and onto YouTube and other platforms in search of the truth, or at least to escape boomer waffle. And not only young people: it has driven me there too.
Right off the bat, there are three stark differences between the world of the eighties and nineties and the world of 2026. They are that, back then, there was not a long running major war on the eastern edge of Europe that involved a world superpower; there was no proper internet and lastly, the American president was not Donald J Trump.
To start with the Ukraine war, I sometimes find it hard to believe it has now been going on for four years. In that time, it has mutated from warfare that my father would have recognised in 1944; a war of tanks and infantry tactics, to what is going on now, with drone operators able to kill an individual soldier miles away.
Whatever the origins of Russia’s differences with NATO (NATO overreached in wanting to get Ukraine aboard and underestimated Putin’s hatred for it), it was Russia that invaded Ukraine in 2022. Europe supported Ukraine against a Russian aggression that appeared to threaten the peace of Europe. President Biden got behind European leaders, as head of the chief power in the NATO alliance. Europe and NATO were naive to imagine this meant a blank cheque for Ukraine’s defence, especially if Trump got back in.
In the course of a year, his successor seems to have gone over to the side of Putin and Russia and he is now threatening to annex Greenland, a territory controlled by NATO ally Denmark and thereby end or damage the alliance. No conflict of the eighties or nineties presented such a threat to the existing world order as this current war.
Then, the internet, controlled as it is by a small group of the richest men in the world, four of whom were literally in the front row of honoured guests at Trump’s inauguration on 20 January last year. To understand just how the internet and the control that these men have over it has changed things for us all, consider only one example involving X, formerly Twitter, that belongs to Elon Musk.
In November 2025, X rolled out a feature that enabled a user to click on another user’s profile page and discover where that account was based. Within hours, the facility was removed. It has since been re-instated. The point is that the facility revealed immediately that certain high-profile accounts, some with millions of followers that supported and propagated the beliefs of Donald Trump’s MAGA followers were based, not in the US where they purported to be, but in foreign countries. Some of the accounts bore X’s ‘Premium Blue’ check mark, enabling their operators to derive income from their activities.
I am sure that in the 1980s and 1990s Mr Kettle never dreamed that an automated digital entity might one day replicate human supporters of a political ideology to benefit a political party or politician and influence the political process.
And so at last to Trump. In his piece, Mr Kettle describes Ronald Reagan as a ‘maverick president.’ Dear God. Compared to his successor, Reagan looks like Mr Magoo.
People made fun of Reagan. Robin Williams could impersonate him to a nicety and used it to mock him to great effect for being old and confused. But Reagan was a trained actor and if he could do nothing else, he could deliver a good speech. Compared to the ravings of the current incumbent, some of Reagan’s speeches sound elegant and, well, presidential. But the main thing is that, for all his faults, I don’t think Reagan was cruel or vengeful. If he was, it was not something he showed publicly.
Since I wrote my last piece about Trump, I have been trying to think of the one or two things that set him apart from any other president. I think now it is his capacity and raging desire to seek and exact revenge and his shameless use of the government apparatus to do it.
There are many examples, but he has just subpoenaed the chairman of his country’s reserve bank, Jerome Powell, to answer charges of criminal improprieties during current renovations at the bank’s headquarters. Mr Powell has issued a statement to explain that he has served blamelessly in the bank under four administrations and carried out his duties without fear or favour to preserve the national economic stability. His only sin seems to have been to refuse to adjust the base interest rate to suit the current president.
In this cruelty and his attacks on anyone that has wronged him in any way, no matter how slight, Trump looks increasingly like a Caligula. In his pursuit of revenge against any Democrat opponent he is destroying swathes of the checks and balances so carefully written into the country’s constitution by its authors. Many Americans still believe in these institutions and that Democratic gains in this year’s midterms will precede a thumping defeat for the Republican candidate in the presidential election in 2028.
Others are not so sanguine. Some of the outspoken vloggers I follow on YouTube warn that Trump is engaged in a softening up exercise for the imposition of martial law on some pretext and the cancellation of those elections. As Trump contemplates the annexation of Greenland, the fears of these vloggers are real and immediate. And it’s not only my wild vloggers who are onto this: check out Jimmy Kimmel.
I wonder whether the greatest danger Trump represents to the world arises not from his ability to overturn the political arrangements in other sovereign states, but that he might destroy them in his own. For, if he destroys democracy in the United States, what chance will there be for it anywhere else?
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