On Monday I had a funny half-idea for this week’s hilarious Nerve laff-riot: something about Tory escapee Robert Jenrick being forcibly ejected early by Kemi Badenoch from a plane that was already in a nosedive blah blah blah ka-boom! But who can even remember now that the mural-ruining child-hater defected from the Tories to Reform last week, hoping to make a big impression? His self-satirising reverse-ferret seems furiously irrelevant since the possibility of World War III began to hover on the horizon. There’s a new sheriff in town! No one’s interested, Robert. Donald Trump appears to be declaring war on Nato! Did you find that sheriff’s badge in a cereal box?
It’s Wednesday afternoon. I am trying to listen to Trump’s Davos speech so I can write jokes about it. But I give up. Trump’s Davos speech is beyond parody. It is full of easily disproven lies, petty personal grudges, ignorant insults, disgraceful historical revisionism, basic geographical and geological errors, random substitutions of apparently indistinguishable Scandinavian island nations, facile self-aggrandisement, barely codified racism, bizarre disparagement of ice, nonsensical misunderstandings of the mutable nature of physical matter and the differences between land and water, ferocious hostility to wind, endless irrelevant details of domestic US policy, clattering collisions of incoherently crunched numbers, and the spirit-crushing conflation of wealth with happiness. Somewhere in the speech, the clarification of Trump’s warlike intentions that the world wanted so much to hear lay hidden, as if he were a massive louse laying his tiny eggs of hope in a toddler’s hair.
And all of this was delivered in an endless wheezy repetitive monotone that managed to be both soul-chillingly menacing and comically bland simultaneously, like a poisonous cobra with the face of Iain Dale. And when this snake thing opens its mouth to spit venom, all that comes out of the Iain Dale’s face bit is the sound of the saxophone solo from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street. Or something.
To take the time to satirise Trump’s Davos speech would be to dignify it in a way it doesn’t deserve. At Dudley Zoo and Castle in the early 70s I stood with my grandmother, her bottle-green mac glowing in the shadow of the 13th-century fortifications, as we watched a clearly distressed gorilla circling its concrete enclosure growling in rage and mewling in distress. We didn’t slurp on our ice-creams and wonder if the ape was trying to tell us something about its plans for the world, or boast about its successful domestic economic policies. We had the sense to know that it was angry, in pain, confused, and crazy. And yet still dangerous.
Trump’s speech was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, hatred of wind and misunderstanding of ice, signifying nothing. Except the fact that democratic nations need to get on with the business of living in a world in which an America run by this incoherent and deranged psychopathic liar is at best irrelevant, and at worst the biggest threat faced by human civilisation since clackers.
Eventually that Dudley Zoo gorilla threw a handful of its own excrement at my gran and it went in her newly permed hair, a gesture which seems dignified, in retrospect, compared to Trump’s Davos speech. And remember, Trump reminded us, without America the Swiss would have been speaking German, a language two-thirds of the Swiss speak anyway. Rightwing opinion columnists! Take your tired “Trump Derangement Syndrome” putdowns and shove them up your Hartley-Brewers!
At the end of his speech Trump appeared to conclude that he will not militarily attack Greenland in his efforts to acquire the “big piece of ice”. This statement is without meaning, as Trump is utterly untrustworthy. To make any future plans based on believing it would be like building a brick wall and using jelly for grout. There are Canon Pixma printers that are more reliable than Donald Trump, and at least they are not the subject of a concerted effort to suppress whatever information may exist about their possible involvement in child sex trafficking.
Somewhere in the speech, the clarification of Trump’s warlike intentions lay hidden, as if he were a massive louse laying his tiny eggs of hope in a toddler’s hair
Trump is concerned about Putin invading Greenland. But he also wants Putin to join his billion-dollars-a-plate Board of Peace protection racket. (Nice country you have there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.) It’s like Shaggy saying he thinks the creepy old bald man is trying to scare the kids away from the ice rink so he can take it over himself, and then inviting him to join the Scooby-Doo gang and come for a ride in the Mystery Machine.
But on some level Trump is trustworthy. In December he announced, clearly and coherently, that America planned to use financial heft, propaganda and online influence to destabilise liberal European democracies and push them into the hands of the far-right parties Trump favoured. We are at war! But no one has really taken much notice. Then, bored with waiting for results, Trump just decided to threaten to invade Greenland instead.
Ah bollocks! I’ve been working on this piece since 3pm and suddenly, at 7.41, Trump’s announced he won’t be imposing tariffs on pro-Greenland nations after all and that he has formed a workable framework for its future agreed upon by Nato secretary general Mark Rutte. So do I have to rewrite the first half of this piece? Or just not bother? Because everything could change by 8.41 anyway.
But it’s not me you should feel sorry for. It’s Trump’s great friend Nigel Farage. Because on Wednesday Farage announced support for the idea that Trump should take over Greenland as it would make the world a “better, more secure place”. But suddenly Trump says he’s not invading Greenland any more anyway, and Farage knows what it feels like to be a Labour backbencher defending a policy that’s already been abandoned. Maybe Farage should keep out of geopolitics. Isn’t there a dead paedophile somewhere who needs Farage to pretend to have been great friends with him on Cameo for the usual rates? It’s a shame Farage’s LOL-loving friend Ian Watkins died. He’s the kind of person who would be a perfect fit for a position on Trump’s Board of Peace.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February