Donald Trump: Now and Then, Here and There.
A report from a miserable anti-Trump rally back in January reveals how Trump was used by cynical British activists for their own ends, and just how wrong they were.

The following piece was written back in January of this year, following my experience reporting on an anti-Trump rally in Glasgow. Organised by the Socialist Workers Party and the pressure group Stand Up To Racism, the rally was to the rather futile end of protesting the inauguration of President Trump, and showing British people’s solidarity with those in America doing the same. It suffered in many respects from the 3,420 miles between Washington D.C. and Glasgow, not least because the cynical and shameless organisers seemed to be aware of this, and hijacked it for their own, much more local and immediate ends. Dressed up as a grass-roots left-wing opposition to Trump, this was an ultimately dismal display which left me, no supporter of the President, despairing for the state of youth protest everywhere.
A great deal has changed in the intervening eight months; as I write, Steve Bannon, the Machiavellian genius/animated corpse who very probably put the orange narcissist in the White House, has just been sent packing back to Breitbart. This now extinguishes the era of the popular campaign trail Trump and cements the era of the rudderless President we now see haemorrhaging support where he was once strong. For sure, this is the first time I would be willing to lend any credence to the theory of the White House’s “moderating influence” on the President; the dark force which translated Trump’s vague patriotic sentiment into a solid ideology of “economic nationalism” is gone.
The situation in Europe has also changed: eight months ago, the idea of Brexit as something akin to the ascendance of a Mosely-Powell-Griffin triumvirate was only beginning to be shown up as nonsense; and Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen hadn’t yet been soundly defeated. Now, of course, we have europhiles in Paris and Amsterdam, and Angela Merkel has recovered from the drop in support she briefly suffered during the migrant crisis — we now expect her to win again in September. Indeed, the doom-mongering we heard in these areas has come to nothing, as all perceptive and fair-minded people could have told you back then.
But when it comes to questions of free speech, the far right and the conduct of protestors, the miserable events at Charlottesville, and the President’s woeful response to them, has naturally become the watershed moment that has really changed everything. I publish this piece now, then, in the interests of perspective; not just temporal (although you will see below how wrong the fools in charge of this protest were) but also geographic. Our world isn’t as globalised as you might think — the conventions of popular protest in Britain aren’t quite the same as they are in the infinitely more febrile atmosphere of America. To show solidarity is one thing, but a British “anti-Trump” protest must always lack the immediacy, urgency and efficacy of its American counterparts. Americans have immediate demands, and the President affects every inch of their lives — not so in Britain. Accordingly, the scene is set at British protests for all manner of ulterior agendas to append themselves to a vague anti-Trump sentiment and exploit a well of righteous, cheering indignation. The sinister characters of the shady SWP understood this well enough, and as you will read below, were quite happy to lure people in with Trump, and then force them to swallow their nauseating ideas. Demagogy at its finest.
I can prove all of this by fielding a simple consideration — The protest was billed as an Anti-Trump protest and I am resolutely anti-Trump. Why then did I leave disgusted with the whole thing?
Read on to find out.
“ I shall begin this report of the Stand Up to Racism/Socialist Workers Party anti-Trump rally by talking about Hitler. I’ve just returned from an evening at my friend’s house where, of weekend evenings, we usually enjoy a few tins or a bottle of wine and the kind of film that doesn’t demand a great deal of concentration to follow. A perfect Saturday night in many respects, we elected to stick on Hitler — The Rise of Evil, starring Maryhill’s own Bobby Carlisle and supported by the handy framework of a very familiar history. When you’re on nodding terms with those infamous decades, it doesn’t take a great deal of effort to slot back into the story after allowing the mind to stray into a temporary half-cut haze and we put it on expecting some overly dramatized middle-brow cavort perfect for drinking to. The film actually turned out to be much better than I’d expected (Bobby Carlisle giving a quite literally thrilling performance) but as we’d already sank a few before we realised its obvious merit, the evening preceded as planned. Suddenly, we became two giggling fools disrespecting a decent film. In typically self-indulgent fashion, for example, I likened to ascent of the onscreen Glaswegian Hitler to the recent rise of President Trump, in a cosmetic comparison which, of course, doesn’t really exist. This joke engendered a half-arsed “heh” from my mate and promptly died a death. Hardly the height of rapier wit, I concede.
But this comparison would appear to have more traction than you’d think. Off the back of that self-same tenuous link, Stand Up To Racism and the ever-crusading SWP actually attracted what could reasonably be described as a “crowd” to an anti-Trump rally in central Glasgow. Screeching about uncomfortable though “not exact” (you don’t say!) links to 1930s Germany, they invited people across Scotland to protest Trump’s inauguration beneath the Donald Dewar Statue at the head of Buchannan Street. I went along to cover it for the Glasgow Guardian, and you can read my attempts at restraint and neutrality in that paper. I shan’t be restrained or neutral here.
So after such a fatuous invitation notice, my hopes for the effectiveness of the event in fomenting a grass-roots left-wing response to nascent Trumpism (heaven forbid he should create an –ism) were little above ankle level. None-the-less, I like to think I do stand against the heinous President and I went along hoping to find attendees and speakers I could say were, broadly, on my side. I had no such luck; what I was met with that evening was such a sorry mob of demagogic fanatics that I only found myself gritting my teeth and directing perfectly useful ire and energy at folk who, by rights, deserved little more than my contempt. In short, the SWP, SUTR and their cheering mob outlined a stupid, exclusionary and extremist anti-Trump position; there is great popular appeal in resisting Trump — it sometimes seems a matter of human decency — but this lot can’t possibly have appealed to anyone to the right of Lenin, or indeed anyone who finds the notion of an America half-populated by proud, illiterate racists a little unconvincing.

To begin with perhaps the smuggest speaker, then. One would expect, given the disturbing similarities between rust-belt America and Thatcher-era northern Britain, that the SWP would have some real empathy with those who, entirely let down by an uncaring Obama administration and disillusioned by an ineffective Clinton campaign, decided to opt for Trump and his promises of prioritising American industry. I cannot imagine what I would do were I one of these neglected voters, but I’m willing to accept that I might have been motivated by something other than a hatred of blacks and Mexicans. The SWP and SUTR don’t seem to agree, and proved so when they fielded a vaguely batty-looking middle-aged ass to recite a poem that threw-up real concern for the future of poetry itself, let alone the anti-Trump movement. Allow me to quote the lines that best illustrate his arrogant, sneering contempt:
I shall vote Trump because I want to uphold the constitution even though I can’t actually read it.
I shall vote Trump because I want my president to be orange, not black.
I shall vote Trump because Hillary Clinton is secretly black
I shall vote Trump because I can vote now, because I’ve learned the alphabet all the way up to X.
I shall vote Trump because I can’t wait to wear my white hood proudly again
As you can no doubt tell, this witless poetaster (introduced only as “Roger over here”) employed a simple “I shall vote Trump because […]” formula to deploy either boring clichés about American Idiots or quite ugly sneers at the near-62 million KKK supporting illiterates that exist in his head. They tell us in English Literature that just about anything can be poetry, but shit like this requires some serious mental acrobatics to fit under such a rubric.
“Roger over here” may well have been the most irritating speaker at the event, if only for his infuriating smugness, but he was by no means the only, or even the most harmful, to disgrace the Buchannan Street steps. One speaker who took the simple “anti-Trump” cause for the rally and ran with it into some intolerably extreme territory was self-proclaimed “economic migrant” Joshua Brown, from Stand Up To Racism, who ludicrously bleated about his escape from America to Scotland and his unfortunate family who had been “left behind”. This confusing of the USA with East Germany was quite typical of the ugly self-pity that characterised several of the American speakers and it should hardly surprise that he went on to criticise his homeland in terms even Michael Moore would baulk at. His speech was such a nihilistic assessment as to make one wonder if removing Trump would do any good at all. Brown wouldn’t seem to be so much a stock far left anti-neoimperialist, but rather an active hater of America. I feel I must quote him at some length. –
America is the pinnacle of capitalism and imperialism in the world. America exports death and destruction for profit, that’s what they are the best at. America is only number one at one thing and that’s hurting other people inside its own borders and beyond.
This sounds like a problem a great deal more fundamental than the designs of a man who, at that point, had been president for about an hour. If one were to accept Brown’s bombast, one would have to seriously relativize Trump amongst a succession of presumably evil leaders of such a tyrannical USA. I for one couldn’t see how anyone could accept such extremism, so removed from what we were all supposedly there for, but the jeering crowd whooped along none the less. They must have heard this kind of thing before.
Excepting some campaigners from the Faslane Peace Camp, whose cause I have great sympathy with, the quality of discourse never once peaked above this dismal standard. But sadly even they, two thankfully reserved women (I’d had enough of bluster), disappointed when they delivered the irresponsible falsehood that Trump has access to Britain’s nuclear codes. I believe they drew this conclusion from the fact that America has loaned the UK nuclear weapons and that the British nuclear arsenal relies heavily on American support; but this isn’t quite the same thing and the suggestion that Trump could launch a British nuke at will should have been unconvincing to all in attendance. It didn’t seem to be, but this was only typical of the factual non-rigour that characterised the event.
Now of course, I can’t very well proceed with any criticism of the disgraced SWP without reference to why they are so famously disgraced. The truth is that after a well-publicised scandal involving endemic rape allegations and the protection of a top party official accused of assaulting a young female member, no feminist worth the name would consider the SWP above their contempt.. Their events are consistently boycotted and I’m happy to say that this was no exception. A number of groups, including LGBT-campaign organisation Glasgow Free Pride, actually organised an alternative inauguration protest in George Square happening at the same time, allowing those who would care to voice their opinion and still give the SWP a wide berth a chance to do so — sounds alright to me. As far as I can tell, this event was well-attended and successful, even if it lacked any booked speakers, owing to its last minute organisation. You may wish to consult Glasgow University’s qmunicate magazine, who I believe constituted a small proportion of meagre coverage it received thanks to the higher profile farce which I attended.

As if to temper the firebrand-intensity of Joshua Brown and his like, the SUTR/SWP rally was also marked by the occasional tactful shift to almost weepy sentimentalism. A particularly wet New Yorker introduced only as Jake spoke of his “tears of happiness and of joy” at the civic minded Scots, who “don’t have to be here” and had gathered in protest at something happening in his country. I remember noting at this point that a great deal of the night’s speeches were actually not concerned with America at all. Joshua Brown, for one, brought the politics much closer to home when he described Trump and Theresa May as “two cheeks of the same arse that we need to kick” and a women ostensibly in the role of MC spoke of “Working class solidarity” against the rise of UKIP and the right-wing in Britain (something which, in light of the contemptable sneering at every disadvantaged Trump voter from every speaker who cared to mention them, provoked a bitter laugh from this reporter). I would have quite liked to “stand in solidarity” with the much more honest and urgent protests occurring in the states, but it wasn’t long before it became clear just how secondary that aim was. Indeed, I left with the firm impression that this protest of Trump’s inauguration was only a means to rallying support for the broader extreme leftism of the SWP. As I mentioned before, if you should wish to oppose Trump shoulder to shoulder with these people, you had better expect to resign yourself to revolutionary communism as well.
Although there was no shortage of demagogic extremists stoking the fervour of the crowd with their speeches, it was in fact the numerous chants which I imagine will linger longest in peoples’ minds. Let it never be said that a catchy slogan isn’t useful — a memorable anchor to which more nuanced argument can be tethered — it was only the complete absence of said nuance which made them ring hollow. They ranged from the stock — “Dump Trump!” — to the more specific — “We don’t want your tiny hands, anywhere near our underpants!”. I’m certain I heard some attendees altering “Dump” to a famous four-letter expletive and it must be said that the irony of the latter chant coming from the mouths of SWP supporters was not lost on this reporter.
It is probably worth closing with an examination of the well-publicised “alternative inauguration oath”, as it certainly had the air of a centrepiece about it. After extended flights into the realms of communist extremism and local issues quite distinct from Trump, the organisers were at least wise enough to bring things back to the central reason everyone had come. I reproduce this declaration of faith, which did indeed remind me of a church service, below:
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully oppose the racism, sexism and Islamophobia of the president of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the rights of the people threatened by this president.”.
Nothing to argue with there, then. I would only add that one can do all of that and still kick these cynical extremists, so comfortable exploiting a great public cause for their own ends, firmly to the kerbs and side-lines where they belong. I for one resent being lumped in with such malcontents by virtue of my opposition to America’s new president. How could I fail to be troubled by the racist, misogynist, arrogant, impetuous, thin-skinned, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, volatile and incompetent ass that now leads the free world? But I have no qualms being also troubled by Joshua Brown’s evident desire to destroy American democracy along with him, and I’m nauseated by the sorry likes of “Roger over here”, as he spits on those who could not see a future for themselves under Clinton. I also have an old-fashioned respect for a sober response, and would rather not pursue revolutionary Communism with rape apologists like the SWP all because I think it might kick Trump out of the White House.
As I sat in the pub afterwards, reading a poorly written and gushing obituary of Fidel Castro in a paper that I’d purchased from the Revolutionary Communist Group, I only became more certain that if these people stand opposing Trump, then I must stand off to the side. I hope I don’t stand alone.”
