Donald Trump 2.0: Genie out of the bottle
There was a joke doing the rounds on X during the UK General Election that Keir Starmer had access to a magic genie, granting his wishes to make the election as easy as possible. Everything seemed to fall his way, and everything his opponents did seemed to end up as a catastrophic blunder. The US election was by no means smooth sailing for Donald Trump, but his landslide victory had a touch of the genie about it.
The result presents some immediate political difficulties for Keir Starmer. Trump’s campaign has accused the Labour Party of election interference, and Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s past comments about Trump could also be viewed as inopportune.?
While a bit awkward, this shouldn’t cause too many issues. Trump is a man capable of wearing his grudges surprisingly lightly – just ask Marco Rubio, or for that matter Vice President Elect JD Vance.?
What should concern Starmer is what the result says more broadly about democratic politics at the moment. As soon as they get the opportunity, electorates everywhere are giving incumbent governments a shellacking. The Conservatives were turfed out during the summer, and US voters have just rejected a promotion for the sitting Vice President. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada and Olaf Scholz’s SDP in Germany are braced for a reckoning.
What’s going on? Voters really, really disliked it when another genie – inflation – escaped its bottle and are prepared to give a kicking to the governments that oversaw rising prices in recent years. If Starmer is interested in a second term he will do well to bear this in mind.
领英推荐
Not that it will be easy. One of the brutal realities about being Prime Minister is that you spend a lot of your time dealing with the fallout from, and taking the blame for, events that were not within your control. European inflation was largely a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which gummed up supply chains and sent energy prices rocketing. Neither of these events could be prevented by a British Prime Minister.
The election of Donald Trump creates a problem for Starmer because inflation now looks much more likely to return. If he is serious about tariffs, Trump will significantly disrupt international trade and push prices back up again. Rachel Reeves, who raised spending in the Budget last week, must be careful not to add to any inflationary spiral.
Starmer will be hoping that the inflation genie remains firmly in its bottle over the next four years. We will be hosting a webinar with Erik Olson, President at our US affiliate agency Venn Strategies, on what a Trump presidency means for the economy and a range of other issues on 21 November. Get in touch if you’d like to hear more!