It’s time to consider the real Trump

For 18 months, Donald Trump was amazingly useful to British politicians. Whatever their party, he provided them with the most magnificent means with which to polish their liberal credentials. In January, when the British Parliament spent three hours debating a public petition to ban Trump from entering the country, we learned from Labour’s Rupa Huq that he was ‘racist, homophobic, misogynist’, from the Conservative Marcus Fysh that he was ‘the orange prince of American self-publicity’ and from the SNP’s Gavin Newlands that he was not only ‘racist, sexist and bigoted’, but ‘an idiot’.

So perhaps now that the giggling has subsided, we can get down to a more realistic assessment of the man and his views. Some unsavoury personal moments aside, the accusation that Trump was a misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic racist simply constituted the liberal press’s best effort at holing his campaign below the waterline. In reality, Trump is a man who holds liberal New York opinions and would be unable to set about ‘rolling back’ liberal rights even if he wanted to.