Ben Lowry: Donald Trump should be removed from the White House, even though he is in his final days there

Few of these voices are well known in Northern Ireland — names such as David Frum, Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol and George F Will — but they have been brave during the Trump presidency, breaking with their Republican Party loyalties to call him out.

Of course left wing Americans want Trump to be impeached, but it is more telling when American conservatives do too. They are going against a man who is overwhelmingly popular within their tribe.

More on that in a moment. But first I want to address unionists in Northern Ireland who are either fans of Donald Trump or, like many moderate conservatives in America, wary of him but repelled by alternatives in the Democratic Party.

Two months ago, when I wrote a ‘good riddance to Trump’ column (see link below), I got several critical messages, including one from someone who expressed dismay at me endorsing an “IRA supporter”, Joe Biden.

I would say this in reply.

Yes, it is worrying that the White House will be inhabited by someone who, more than any president since John F Kennedy, instinctively sides with Irish nationalism.

Most US presidents in living memory have been instinctively pro Anglo in sympathies.

President Obama was famously accused of being anti British by Boris Johnson, but I think his presidency was more indifferent to the UK than hostile. He was the pivot-to-Asia president (by chance I was in Beijing the day he met China’s president in Tiananmen square in 2009, his first visit as US leader).

Most recent presidents have been what Americans call ‘mutts’: reflecting the mixed heritage of a country built mainly on multiple European nationalities, but largely English and German, with plenty of Scots Irish (ie Ulster Protestant) and some Catholic Irish ancestry (there are of course lots of the latter, but like Italian Americans they took much longer to penetrate America’s ruling class).

That dominant northern European Protestant ancestry was apparent in the following presidents, going back from most recent to World War II: Trump, Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt.

Obama is not listed above because while his mother was classically Anglo Saxon (English, German, Scots, Welsh, Irish, etc) he was the first president with recent African ancestors. Nor is Kennedy, who had a much narrower Irish background, with (as far as I can see, from researching online) all his great grandparents born in Ireland.

Yet even he was not anglophobic (unlike his father Joe, who was).

Joe Biden is only the second Catholic US president to date. Much has been made of his “I’m Irish” quip to a reporter who announced he was from the BBC. He said it with a smile, as he did his “Orange not welcome” remark on St Patrick’s Day.

Such comments of course trouble unionists, given how past Irish American influence has put pressure on London. It helped to push even Margaret Thatcher to reward (in 1985) a Republic that never got tough over IRA use of its territory as a base (not even after the Anglo Irish Agreement of that year).

Of course it would be better for unionists, and Britain, to have a president who had not swallowed the Irish lobbying over Brexit (when last year he threatened the UK with no US trade deal if it did not “respect” the Belfast Agreement, ie the nationalist slant on that deal).

But his political track record is pragmatic. Some Irish Americans display a hatred of Britain that is rare even in Ireland. Such people backed Sinn Fein in the 1980s, let alone now. I am not aware of evidence that Mr Biden was ever so fixated on Irish republican aims.

He is far from ideal from a UK perspective. But then consider the alternative, Donald Trump.

There is a letter, opposite (in the print edition, see link below), from Thomas Stewart, which says that instead of dismissing Trump’s massive support, we need to ask why it arose. He suggests reasons such as worsening inequality that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

I agree. In 2007 I wrote an article about a key cause of that crash, saying that Northern Ireland houses were dangerously over priced.

For years I wrote about how soaring house prices had been celebrated, yet all they did was reward the older generations and shut younger ones out of home ownership, and lower paid workers too. Deepening layers of people felt they had no stake in society, fuelling resentment and political instability.

Other concerns associated with Trump (and Brexit) voters, such as immigration, are also legitimate. Yet when working people say they are losing their culture and jobs, privileged folk sneer at their ‘racism’.

Concerns over other matters such as Muslim extremism are dismissed as Islamophobia (in NI this reached almost comical levels when Pastor Jim McConnell was prosecuted for a anti Islamic sermon, after a complaint from a man who praised the barbarians of Islamic State – ‘for bringing peace to Mosul’).

Voters on both sides of the Atlantic have been alarmed by other trends, such as the rise of identity-based hyper liberalism, that is taking shape in punitive ‘rights’ legislation and calls to defund the police.

Western civilisation badly needs sensible conservative leaders, who understand such anxieties. Instead the fears have been dismissed, which helped lead to Trump.

Rather than recap on my last column about him, and why it was clear that he was a monster well before his 2016 election victory, we only need to consider his conduct since he lost the recent election.

It was almost 24 hours after polling closed on Tuesday November 3 before it became obvious that Joe Biden had narrowly but decisively won. Late on the Wednesday it was clear he was pulling far ahead in the overall US popular vote (he would end up with a 4.5% lead, not as far behind his poll lead of 8% as it first seemed). He was also edging clear in most of the key knife-edge states.

Late that night I felt confident enough to pen a piece ‘Biden set to win both the presidency and most votes’ which I put online right away (see link below) and which appeared in the Thursday paper.

If I had been wrong, few people would have noticed an error in a Northern Ireland paper, but it would have been embarrassing even so. I wasn’t.

The US TV networks had to be more careful and did not declare Biden as victor until the Saturday.

Yet Trump has led many Americans to think the election was stolen. Even a man so base somehow managed to plumb new depths in his rally before Capitol Hill was stormed. A quarter of Americans think the violence was acceptable.

For years Trump has seemed to be psychologically unwell. But whatever the exact cause of his despicable conduct, he has damaged democracy around the free world, boosting the worst dictators and our global enemies.

For inciting an insurrection he should be ejected from the White House in disgrace, rather than allowed to leave on January 20 claiming victory.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry on Nov 4: Joe Biden was always going to win most votes but now is set to win presidency too

• Ben Lowry on Nov 7: Good riddance to Donald Trump

• Letter: There is no excuse for storming Congress but there is a reason for the Trump vote

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