Donald Trump’s appointments to his top team continue, as Rishi Sunak would have said, “at pace”. There’s a vaccine sceptic in at health, a misogynist as attorney general, a possible Russia sympathiser as director of national intelligence and first choice for defence is a Fox News anchorman. Oh, and the new US ambassador to Israel believes there’s no such thing as the West Bank.
Yet what they may lack in intellectual rigour, moral rectitude and empathy, they more than compensate for in fake tans, chiselled jaws and mistresses. Where once Gordon Brown worked to build a “goat” (government of all talents), Trump is opting for a government of old goats. We could discuss the social, economic and cultural failings over two centuries of US history that have brought it to this place. But I’ve only got 400 words, so let’s talk Die Hard instead. (Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 obviously. Everyone lost interest by the last two.)
Anyway, Pete Hegseth, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a Guantánamo Bay guard and New Year’s Eve countdown host for Fox News and is poised to be defence secretary if a previous sex assault allegation doesn’t scupper it, is a big Die Hard fan. His recent bestselling book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, is a deeply troubling rant about elites, where he condenses the world’s ills into that fateful Christmas Eve when something incredible was born. He writes: “Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard.
“But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane – their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful and deadly.” It’s easy for the left to snigger at the testosterone-fuelled, gun-slinging, dick-swinging vibe of this new Trump administration. But it got more than half of the US votes. Meanwhile, Die Hard remains one of the most re-watched movies ever. It’s time the left acknowledged the need for heroes. And time it reclaimed John McClane, the brave public servant from an immigrant family fighting the evil of global greed. More importantly, it needs to answer once and for all: is it really a Christmas movie?
Score draw
I’m slightly bemused by the outrage over Premier League referee David Coote. First, audio was revealed of Coote swearing about Liverpool FC and Jürgen Klopp. Then there was video of him snorting a “white powder”.
It was a great exclusive for the Sun. Clearly Coote has been done up like a kipper and is in big trouble. But, but, but… Klopp, Liverpool fans and football fans more broadly have sworn at referees with just such language week in, week out – to their faces. And anyone who’s been near a Premier League stadium in recent years will know how much of fans’ excitement is being fuelled by an epidemic of “white powder”. A study in 2021 revealed one-third of fans had seen other supporters taking cocaine at matches. I’d say Coote was just making it a score draw.
Time to ex-X
Today I am mainly going to be spending the day signing up to Bluesky. It’s time to become ex-X. It was an admirable step by the Guardian to quit Elon Musk’s X in the wake of the social media platform’s increasing ugliness. This will come at a cost in terms of traffic numbers – and potentially revenue – but is unquestionably the right thing to do. Even Stephen King has quit, calling the site “too toxic”. And he’s a man comfortable with horror.
Recent months on X have felt like being locked in a King film. Or maybe a morgue staffed by creeps and ghouls. All that’s missing is the rubber shoes. But Musk is about to discover that in the media there is something worse than the wokery he despises, and that’s irrelevance. And it’s coming X’s way very soon.
• Alison Phillips is a former Mirror editor-in-chief
• This article was amended on 17 November 2024. An earlier version said that more than half the US population voted for Donald Trump’s administration; that should have said that more than half of the votes were for Trump’s administration.
