Donald Trump is not a patient man. Even his inaugural address lasted for only 16 minutes. Still, the message was clear enough: ‘The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.’ The slow-burning chit-chat of the Washington elite is the stuff of the past, a hangover of the ‘American carnage’ that came to an end last Friday. In fact, to save time altogether, Trump could have simply condensed his address into a single tweet: Americans are as mad as hell and they aren’t going to wait anymore!
Brexit voters will know what he means. They, too, are tired of playing the waiting game. A few weeks back, when Sir Ivan Rogers revealed that a UK-EU trade deal could take a decade to finalise, several prominent Brexiteers went into a tailspin. His crime was temporisation. His resignation, which followed soon after, was welcomed as a sign that things were full steam ahead.
The populist wave sweeping western democracies is being fuelled by this impatience.
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