The Speech to Trump I Never Got to Make

Along with others I was asked to speak at the the first of the Trump Protests in the UK last week. I was to be representing the Oxfordshire Green Party.

Sadly, due to the way the protest worked out, no one got to address the crowd of some 3000 people who had come from far and wide to make their views known on this man receiving a state visit in everything but name.

As I’d already written the speech, I thought I should put it somewhere. Even though Trump has now thankfully left these shores to wreak havoc somewhere else, and will probably never hear my words, I leave my thoughts on his visit here and hope that, in the UK at least, we never have cause to demonstrate against him darkening our doorstep again.

It’s great to see so many people here. Some of you I know have travelled a long way to demonstrate your resistance to Trump. Thanks for making that effort.

It’s an obscenity that this man is here, Isn’t it?

He’s here, in the heart of our community seeking validation and recognition of himself as a great world leader.

And our government has given it to him!

Even though we were told he wouldn’t be invited for a state visit, he’s got one in everything but name.

Actually I’m quite glad he’s here, so that we all have the opportunity to tell him exactly what we think of him.

Later he’ll sit down to a slap up dinner with Theresa May and other dignitaries while children in this country and his go to bed hungry every night.

But this is man who has no qualms about separating small children from their parents and putting them in cages.

Makes 3 year olds stand in court and has created concentration camps for babies.

This makes sense to him.

This is his vision.

But it’s not ours or that of any sane, decent humane person.

But he’s none of those things.

Like many wannabe dictators before him, he’s self-obsessed, self-deluding and prepared to say and do anything as long as he gets the applause and the adulation from the people that he lies to.

Driven by hatred of anyone he sees as different to him. Anyone he sees as not as entitled and deserving as him.

The poor, migrants, refugees, the LGBT community, Muslims, Mexicans — pretty much anyone who isn’t Donald Trump.

And now he’s invited here to visit the former home and the grave of someone who led us through some of the darkest days of the last century, against very much that same vision. Churchill must be spinning in that grave.

My father fought in the second world war, and my grandfather fought in the first. I’m the first generation of my family that hasn’t had to face a global conflict.

But the rhetoric of hatred being spouted by people like Trump risks making the next generation face those horrors again.

And it’s not just the fact that someone as irresponsible, unaccountable and reckless as Trump commands the largest military force on the planet.

It’s bad enough that he has his hand on the nuclear button. A button that will be right there beside him in Blenheim Palace right now, along with our own next to Theresa May.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the destruction that could be wrought from right here at the push of 2 buttons.

But as a Green, I’m equally horrified by Trump’s other actions which threaten the whole planet in just as direct a way as those buttons.

While he demands NATO nations increase their military spending, his withdrawal from climate change accords, his defunding of renewable energy and denial of environmental issues as an existential threat represents one of the most serious dangers to all of us.

We’re all seeing the effects of climate change now, not least in the crazy weather we’ve had in the UK and around the world in recent years.

And these effects will fuel global unrest, famine, droughts, food poverty, and rises in sea levels. All things that make another world war likely.

Trump’s short-termism in supporting fossil fuels, and undermining renewables is based on profit. Profit for him and for those who support him, and in that sense our government is no different.

Climate shifts touch us all. No one will escape. By denying that, we’re consigning future generations to an horrific world that Trump and his generation will never have to live in.

So we have to make choice. Do we want to live under siege, in a world driven to war by poverty and hatred, where we blame everyone else for our own mistakes? Or do we stand up against the likes of Trump and his warped, jaded, infantile view of the world?

Trump is a clown, but he’s one we have to take seriously. We have to resist him and all the others, like him, who would sell our world, and our peace, for profit and private gain.

And those that have invited him here today. Those that sit down with him and eat with him, slap his back and hope for favours from him, they should remember that there will be a reckoning and a price to pay. Trump may be their fair-weather friend now, but it’s they who’ll be accountable to us in the end.

Blenheim is steeped in history and entitlement, which is probably why Trump is here, but it’s people like us that really make the world what it is — and the world is watching.

Thank you