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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Comment
Sarah Baxter

OPINION - This crackpot US presidential election would be funny if it weren’t sinister

If the 2024 presidential election was a television series we would say it had jumped the shark by now — reached the point of such incredulity as to have lost the plot. The characters are all at each other’s throats. Donald Trump is behaving like a spoilt mean girl, posting “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on social media, while a crazed gunman is lurking for 12 hours with an AK-47 in the bushes at his Florida golf club, hoping to succeed where an earlier would-be assassin had failed. Switching gears, Trump goes into full Churchillian mode and thunders: “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”

This is a crackpot election. With the outcome uncertain, it would be funny if it were not so sinister. Didn’t Trump’s friend, Tucker Carlson, recently declare that Winston Churchill was no big deal anyway? Carlson, who gave a prime time speech at the Republican convention, proudly interviewed a historian on his internet show who claimed Britain’s greatest statesman was a bigger “villain” than Hitler and touted the world’s weirdest excuse for the Holocaust, that the Nazis killed millions of Jews because they lacked the resources to care for them properly.

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