Trump doesn’t translate into English

No, I don’t mean the president’s ability, rare among politicians, to speak and even write in incoherent snippets full of solecisms.

Neither does my topic deal with his infantile vocabulary heavily slanted towards superlatives and general hyperbole. I’m not even going to talk about Trump’s idiosyncratic orthography featuring an inordinate number of inappropriate capitals, whole capitalised sentences and a forest of exclamation marks.

My subject is different, dealing as it does not so much with Trump as a person as with Trump as a phenomenon. (Immanuel Kant would probably insist he is also a noumenon, but we are none of us Kantians, are we?) And my contention is that the same phenomenon is unlikely to occur in England.

Britons are perfectly capable of voting for rank nonentities, which they’ve proved in every general election following the coup that ousted Margaret Thatcher. But never once have they voted in a blustering, narcissistic buffoon constantly talking about himself in terms that Englishmen hesitate to apply even to others.

Granted, every politician standing in an election is going to highlight his achievements or, in their absence, to promise achievements beyond the wildest dreams of his opponent.

But an English politician will do so quietly, diffidently, almost apologetically. No one will ever be elected who says “I’ll be the greatest PM in British history and the greatest statesman in history full stop because I’m the most brilliant high achiever you’ve ever seen.”

For Britons to respond favourably to such a candidate, they’d have to stop being British. This process is certainly under way, but it’s still not quite complete. For the time being, Britons retain enough of their natural qualities to reject loud-mouthed demagogues screaming to the world how wonderful they are, describing everything they do as ‘beautiful’, ‘perfect’ or ‘amazing’.

Americans are different, and I’m speaking from personal experience, having tried to manipulate the masses through advertising in both countries. Shortly after I arrived in London from New York, I was given a task of writing a radio commercial for a chain of high-street shops.

My bright idea was to use the owner of the chain as spokesman. I don’t remember what words I proposed to put into his mouth, but at the time I did think they were clever. However, the agency head rejected my idea out of hand.

“We aren’t Americans you know,” he said. “You can’t turn a British tradesman into a performing flea. They just can’t say ‘I’d give you the same deal I’d give my own mother’. They’d be so embarrassed that they wouldn’t be able to get the words out.”

I’m a quick learner when it comes to trivial subjects, such as advertising. And I used athletes as my teachers. As an inveterate sports watcher, I’ve heard hundreds of post-match interviews given by players still sweating and gasping for breath.

There too the difference between the two countries is instantly obvious. American players flash their impeccable pearly whites and deliver orations that stylistically wouldn’t be out of place at a sales conference. They tend to utter inanities in smooth, well-practised sentences coming right out of a PR manual.

British players utter inanities too, but their sentences are typically neither smooth nor well-practised. Most of them are uneasy in front of the camera, and they clearly struggle to string words together without their customary four-letter conjunctions.

The difference isn’t in the level of public education in the two countries – it’s abysmal in both. The difference lies in the whole ethos, in, if you will, the quintessential makeup of the national character.

Unlike Britain, the US is a country of showmen and salesmen, salesmen as showmen and showmen as salesmen. Americans are no easier to con than Britons but, unlike Britons, they don’t mind being conned provided they are also entertained.

They know perfectly well the used car salesman is fibbing when saying that “this baby has never seen the inside of a repair shop and tell you what, Jim – may I call you Jim? – it never will.” But they are satisfied that the game is being played by the rules, with the salesman delivering the mandated mantra, the eenie-meenie-miny-mo of commerce, but without the objectionable violence towards a person of Afro-American descent.

Like a theatre audience applauding a performance they know is make-believe, the prospective customer may reward the salesman by actually buying that baby that’ll run and run. The salesman kept his end of the bargain – he entertained. A Mowgli-type understanding was reached: we be of one blood, ye and I.

Americans expect similar entertainment, and a similar message, from candidates trying to sell them political goods. There too they’ve been conditioned to accept make-believe as real or rather pretend they do.

They know perfectly well that a candidate has neither the means nor indeed the intention of keeping the campaign promises he makes. Americans know politicians lie through their teeth, which is why they dislike them as a rule.

Britons aren’t excessively fond of politicians either, but at least ours are less given to making grandiloquent claims.

Partly that’s because we don’t vote for national candidates. We vote for our local MP who tends to promise to fix the potholes in the King’s Road, not to bring peace and prosperity for all. Such promises are smaller and more verifiable: if the potholes are indeed filled, we may vote for him again. If not, we’ll vote for someone else next time.

Britons find the US electoral spectacle to be rather tasteless, way too protracted and too akin to show business. Yet that’s precisely what Americans like: their own lives unfold in one plane, politics in another, and they don’t really intersect.

But Americans do expect politicians to offer entertainment value, and the less they look like politicians, the more entertaining they are. By such standards, Trump is indeed the best president ever: no other POTUS ever walked and talked less like a politician.

Trump is a star of the political show, and he upstages all other actors. He talks in the language last heard at an interstate truck stop; he says and does wild things; he takes self-aggrandising braggadocio to a level even American politics has never seen.

And he is conspicuously, boastfully rich, something Americans don’t hold against people as much as Britons do. Our politicians are hardly ever paupers, and some are prosperous beyond most people’s dreams. But any fat cat would be instantly drummed out of politics if he bragged about his wealth the way Trump does.

Envy is less widespread in the US than in Britain: when Americans see a billionaire, they don’t want to take him down a peg. They want to learn from him how to get rich.

That’s especially true if they see that a rich politico is like the guy next door in every other respect: he has never read a book, he speaks ungrammatically, he is crude, his tastes redefine vulgarity. But as long as he continues to entertain, there will always be enough people to support him, beyond his cadre of ideological followers.

Americans don’t want their leaders to be anodyne chaps mouthing sweet nothings and wearing button-down shirts with striped ties. They want them to be stars in a virtual reality show – provided they don’t encroach on the actual reality of everyday life.

Saying crazy, incoherent things is okay, even doing them is perfectly acceptable: that makes make-believe more fun. But when as a result it costs more to buy petrol and groceries, the fun stops. And when young Americans go to fight overseas and come back home in body bags, no one thinks of politics as a road show.

Real life barges in, and suddenly Americans don’t care to be entertained any longer. They will now be happy with the button-down types, provided the standard of living goes back up and no one is asked to die for God knows what.

Britons don’t necessarily like their politicians but they see them as a necessary evil, not circus clowns. When it’s time to vote, they choose whomever they think is the least objectionable candidate, pinch their nostrils and drop the paper into the ballot box.

Even Britons who are themselves vulgar would regard a populist demagogue like Trump as an unspeakable, irredeemably un-British vulgarian. I’d suggest that no other nation is inoculated so thoroughly against loud-mouthed trumpery, something aspiring populists would do well to remember.

The scenario I outlined above is currently unfolding in America: people, even many MAGA supporters, are turning away from Trump. His approval ratings are dropping like a plane hit by an AA missile, and the message is unequivocal. The show is over; it’s now time for statesmen, not circus performers. It looks like Trump has been found out.

To extend Churchill’s quip, it’s not just a common language that Britons and Americans are divided by. The whole ethos is fundamentally different, and I for one am thankful that our own nonentities aren’t proud of their mediocrity. They may be running the country into the ground, but at least they don’t tell us every second how great they are.