Tomorrow night Donald Trump will become the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, American Football’s answer to the FA Cup and Premier League championship rolled into one.
The reaction of the 71,000-strong crowd will be telling. It’s a reasonable bet that his reception will lift the roof off the New Orleans Superdome, packed with both NFL and Trump supporters from Middle America.
In November, Trump won Missouri and Pennsylvania, home states of finalists Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Even those who backed the hapless Kamala Harris – including Taylor Swift, girlfriend of the Chiefs’ star player Travis Kelce – would be well advised to keep their disapproval under their non-MAGA hats.
Since his inauguration, less than three weeks ago, Trump’s popularity has soared outside ‘The Beltway’ – America’s equivalent of the Westminster Bubble.
And that’s for one simple reason: he has kept his word. Trump has done what Sunday’s Chiefs and Eagles fans hope their teams will do. Hit the ground running.
I only arrived here a few days ago, but as a successful sixty-something Florida ophthalmologist – nobody’s idea of a Neanderthal January 6 insurgent – put it: ‘For the past two weeks, it’s been the Fourth of July every day.’
Promises made during Trump’s campaign have been implemented at breakneck speed, leaving the defeated Democrats in disarray. His many detractors have all been spectacularly wrong-footed by a game plan worthy of a wide receiver’s winning touchdown at a Super Bowl.
Since his inauguration, less than three weeks ago, Donald’s Trump’s popularity has soared for one simple reason: he has kept his word and hit the ground running
Rolling news channels have resembled one of those non-stop oldies radio stations. The hits just keep on coming.
Trump may have been elected to the sound of the Village People’s YMCA, but the song which has been spinning round in my head over the past few days is an old Drifters’ dance-floor classic:
Baby you know that I mean what I say, say what I mean, what I mean.
Since moving in to the White House for a second term, Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders covering everything from illegal immigration to banning biological men from women’s sports. Just as he said he would.
He’s even gone one step beyond his election manifesto, floating the idea of America taking over the Gaza Strip – which has dominated the headlines and sent both American and international bien pensant opinion completely bananas.
Yet as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the President at a joint press conference this week: ‘You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say. And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and say: ‘You know what, he’s right.’ ‘
Fevered reaction from the usual suspects now centres on Trump’s vision of Gaza as the new Riviera of the Middle East being the unhinged fantasy of a madman.
Needless to say, our own pedestrian Prime Minister has sided with the knee-jerk pessimists of the EU and those around the world who persist in dismissing any attempt to find an alternative to their Neverland ‘two-state’ solution as unworkable.
But why the hell not? Once Israel has finished wiping out Hamas and the Mad Mullahs of Iran have been neutralised, why shouldn’t Gaza become a beacon of peace and prosperity?
If it’s good enough for Dubai and Qatar, until fairly recently a safe haven for Hamas leaders, why not Gaza? After all, until civil war broke out in Lebanon in the 1970s, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East, playground of the rich and famous, Hollywood stars and friends of the late Aga Khan.
Sir Keir Starmer never answers a straight question and gets petulant when pinned down, writes Richard Littlejohn
Has anyone asked the Palestinian people what they think? Almost certainly not. The Left in Britain, Europe and on American campuses treat the Gazans as a fashion accessory.
The cynical rulers of Arab states such as Saudi Arabia don’t give a damn about the Palestinians.
They only pretend to care in order to placate the so-called ‘Arab Street’, even though the only Arab Street that most of the Sheikhs of Araby are familiar with is London’s Edgware Road.
If Gaza could be turned into a Vegas-style Sin City, under American protection, they wouldn’t have so far to travel for their drinking, gambling and whoring.
Perhaps the Mob could run a revitalised Gaza. They’ve got plenty of experience of making money out of the Strip. And they’ve been looking for a new challenge ever since they lost Cuba and Vegas became family-friendly. Even Hamas might think twice before taking on Vinny The Chin and his associates.
OK, so maybe I jest. But why shouldn’t surrounding Muslim states pull their weight in helping the downtrodden Palestinian people by giving them a temporary home while the bulldozers and reconstruction workers move in?
As for the ‘internationalist’ Left, for decades they’ve described Gaza as an ‘open prison’ – without, obviously, acknowledging Hamas as the jailers. Why wouldn’t they want to give Palestinians the chance to escape?
Surely they don’t genuinely believe that the people of Gaza should be condemned to live among the rubble forever, waiting for Hamas to regroup and restart the ‘cycle of violence’ – something they consistently and ludicrously accuse Israel of perpetuating. Maybe they do.
However realistic or otherwise his ambitions for Gaza, at least Trump has shaken the kaleidoscope, changed the narrative of the past few decades. As Michelle Obama didn’t say: when they aim low, Trump aims high.
But enough already about the Middle East. It’s on the domestic front that the President is having the most immediate impact.
Just as Trump promised, billionaire businessman Elon Musk has been seconded to government to cut waste.
Even on cursory inspection, he has already identified billions of dollars in savings at USAID, the agency responsible for distributing overseas aid.
Tomorrow night Trump will become the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, American Football’s answer to the FA Cup and Premier League rolled into one
Much of the money has been frittered away promoting woke causes around the globe, flying the trans flag from Latin America to the Horn of Africa. They’ve even bankrolled an Iraqi version of the children’s programme Sesame Street.
Musk has also discovered that millions of taxpayer dollars were doled out to sympathetic Left-wing news organisations – including, incredibly, our own BBC.
The involvement of Elon has utterly discombobulated the Democrats, who are squealing like Violet Elizabeth Bott. But while they clutch their pigtails and stamp their bootees over long overdue cuts to lavish foreign aid, Middle America celebrates the fact that someone is recovering their hard-earned, which would be better spent at home.
Once again, the Left has chosen the wrong hill to die on. On NBC’s Nightly News, second only to the Gaza backlash, there was a story about Waffle House – a cheap and cheerful roadside diner chain – slapping a 50 cent surcharge on egg dishes.
This was a reaction to an outbreak of bird flu, but highlighted the huge rise in the cost of living under the Biden administration.
Eggs, like many other grocery staples, have risen by more than 60 per cent over the past four years, partly because of high energy costs caused by the Democrats’ pursuit of the green agenda, which has pushed up the price of everything.
Trump has now rescinded all bans on oil and gas exploration and promised to Drill, Baby, Drill. Middle America is far more interested in ‘pocket book issues’ than the Middle East.
It’s still the economy, stupid.
Unlike Starmer, Trump, having dodged a bullet in the summer, never dodges a difficult question, writes Richard Littlejohn
One of the most heartening images of the past week was Trump, surrounded by beaming women and young girls, signing an order banning biological males from female sports and other safe spaces.
If he can roll back the trans madness in the US, maybe the world – and the UK in particular – will now follow, especially given that he has said trans athletes will not be allowed to compete in women’s events at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
He’s already scrapped DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) hirings across government.
By far his biggest impact has been to carry out his commitment to tackle illegal immigration. He’s halted federal funding to ‘sanctuary cities’, ordered the military to the southern border and started rounding up and deporting thousands of migrants who have no right to be in the US.
The ‘worst of the worst’ are being sent to Guantanamo Bay.
The threat of tariffs, far from starting a trade war, has forced countries like Colombia and El Salvador to take back their citizens and persuaded Canada and Mexico to reinforce their borders to stop the flood of illegal migrants and drugs like fentanyl.
On Thursday, as Trump addressed a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the TV split-screen showed FBI and immigration officials raiding addresses in Colorado linked to Venezuelan gang members.
I was reminded of the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone attends a baptism while his henchmen murder his enemies.
And if he manages to force Nato members to up their defence spending by threatening them, too, that will only serve to make the world a safer place.
Compare and contrast Trump’s first couple of weeks with the mealy-mouthed dishonesty of our own elected leaders and their vacuous promises.
Remember ‘Brexit means Brexit’? ‘We will take back control of our borders.’
‘Tough on crime and the causes of crime.’
And more recently, Labour’s ‘We will not increase taxes on working people’ and ‘This is a Budget for growth’, while doing the exact opposite.
Trump has had four years to prepare for his second term and arrived with a fully-formed programme and the determination to put it into practice on Day One.
Labour had 14 years in Opposition and turned up with next to nothing. Nada, zilch, apart from raising taxes to pay off the unions.
While Trump is closing the border, rounding up illegal immigrants, dismantling the Deep State, declaring war on woke and tackling the cost of living crisis, Surkeir Starmer has set up a quango a week to kick difficult decisions into the long grass.
And, er, that’s about it, apart from crawling back to Brussels, cap in hand.
As for ‘smashing the smuggling gangs’, that appears to have amounted to Starmer flying to Rome for a cappuccino with Giorgia Meloni. And still the boats keep coming.
Far from saving us money, he plans to pay Mauritius £18billion we haven’t got to take the Chagos Islands off our hands while cutting the winter fuel allowance at home.
Wouldn’t you rather a British prime minister put Britain first for once?
Never Trumpers can’t see beyond the orange perma-tan and trademark braggadocio. But if they did, they might realise that Trump is the most revolutionary President since Abraham Lincoln. Maybe they do and that’s why they hate him.
But how refreshing to come across a politician who keeps his word, who says what he means, baby, and then does what he says.
Starmer never answers a straight question and gets petulant when pinned down. Trump, having dodged a bullet in the summer, never dodges a difficult question.
On Sunday, he will revive the tradition of a televised pre-match presidential interview – something the increasingly ga-ga Biden abandoned.
‘They ask a question, and you give them an answer. It’s not that hard,’ he said.
Trump is all but guaranteed a warm welcome at the Super Bowl. This is a game-changing presidency.
If he succeeds, it won’t just be America that benefits. The world wins, too.
