In reality, Trump is referring to limited and not very successful anti-discrimination measures which have seen the proportion of white air traffic controllers fall from 79 per cent in 2020 to 73 per cent in 2022.
As in the past, it is the pettiness, meanness and mendacity of Trump that is shocking. But the grotesque nature of the man raises more important questions about how far his open liking for authoritarian government will slide into an American version of fascism. How far will his purging of opponents from government agencies degrade or cripple them?
The extent to which Trump and his Maga Republicans are fascists is much debated, and there are certainly parallels to be drawn with fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet European fascism a century ago was primarily the product of the First World War, the threat of Communism and the Great Depression.
In his first term, Trump’s anti-democratic onslaught was blunted by his incompetence and inability to get a controlling grip on the levers of state power. He does not intend to let this happen again: witness his vindictive assault on General Mark Milley, previously chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, who said at his retirement ceremony in 2023 that US soldiers took their oath to the constitution and not to “a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take our oath to a wannabe dictator”.
In retaliation for Milley’s opposition, Trump’s newly appointed defence secretary Pete Hegseth has removed his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and instructed an inspector general to inquire into his record. At the time of Milley’s retirement, Trump said he had committed treason and should be put to death.
Comparisons with the Nazis are often exaggerated or misleading, but there are instructive parallels between Hitler becoming German Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and purging his opponents inside and outside his party in “the Night of the Long Knives”, 18 months later on 30 June 1934.
This may already be happening as people like former super-hawk Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, are targeted. For Trump, only fawning loyalty is acceptable. The line-up at the top of the US government – “rogues gallery” might be a better phrase – brings together an extraordinary collection of careerists and crackpots.I have a personal interest in the confirmation hearings of Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK) as Secretary of Health and Human Services, an agency with a budget of $1.7trn (£1.36trn) which oversees Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
There was a great campaign to get everybody vaccinated in the country. Elvis Presley got vaccinated live on television. Stopping polio was perhaps the greatest achievement of the US in the 20th century.
Once the tuberculosis vaccine was in full use, the illness became a rarity. In response to aggressive questions from Senators, not all of them Democrats, RFK backtracked on his past opposition to all vaccinations, saying that he simply wanted scientific proof of their safety and effectiveness.
It's not just migrants who fear Trump's Guantanamo gulag
Read MoreRFK may not end up confirmed, in part because of his anti-vaccination stance, but also because he is pro-abortion and hostile to the big pharmaceutical companies.
This was despite a devastating 33-page letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren, listing his failings, which include “mismanagement of two non-profit organisations you ran, accusations of sexual assault and drinking problems”.Hegseth’s unsuitability to run anything, not to mention the US armed forces, jumps off every page.
Suppose he has to handle another crisis involving nuclear weapons –would he and his deranged appointees do any better than they did then?
An important reason why Starmer and Reeves are such easy meat is that they cannot raise taxes, after the commitments they made during the general election campaign, or borrow more expensive money. Hence their endless talk about “growth”, and headline-grabbing promises about a third runway at Heathrow and our very own Silicon Valley between Oxford and Cambridge. As with HS2 after the 2008 economic crisis, gargantuan projects are given the go-ahead to create optimistic mood music and offer proof that the British economy is not entirely moribund.
As Ronald Heifetz said in Leadership Without Easy Answers, the art of political leadership is “to disappoint followers at a rate they can stand”. Starmer and Reeves are not good at this.
Below the Radar
But the CIA issued a new study last week, commissioned in the last days of the Biden administration but released by the new Trump-appointed director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, that favours the belief that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory carrying out civilian and military work.
I have a natural disinclination to believe anything said by a Trump appointee, but an extraordinary scoop in Seymour Hersh’s Substack just published reveals that “a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning [in 2019] of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that were quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment”.
Hersh says that early studies dealing with “how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus”.
It is not a surprise that the CIA were able to recruit a Chinese virologist in Wuhan since so many Chinese earned their doctorates in the US (in 2019 there were 372,000 Chinese students studying in the country). Before Christmas 2019, the CIA and the medical and scientific bureaucracy had put together a lengthy report on the potential danger of the epidemic. Even so, Trump and his senior officials failed to act in time, though they knew almost as much as the Chinese who had immediately started mitigation measures.
Cockburn’s Pick
For a merciless but amusing account of why Pete Hegseth should not have been confirmed as US Defence Secretary, read this 33-page letter from Senator Warren detailing his appalling track record.
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