The thing that might finally turn his transatlantic fans against Trump – the rest of us are against him anyway – is his contemptuous dismissal of the contributions of European armed forces to America’s wars in recent years.

‘The problem with NATO’, he says, ‘is that, we’ll be there for them 100%, but I’m not sure that they be there for us. If we gave them the call, “Gentlemen, we are being attacked. We’re under attack by such and such a nation”. I know them all very well, I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us. They’re not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you.’ (He meant Greenland, of course.) And again: ‘They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did; they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines’. That got even the Tory press in Britain wild: the implied slur on their brave boys in khaki, more than 450 of whom were killed helping American forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. (A disproportionate number of Danish soldiers – among the first to answer ‘the call’ – also died.) That was felt to be disrespectful, as well as ignorant, especially coming from a notorious ‘draft-dodger’ (those ‘bone spurs’); and was too much Trumpery even for Trump’s leading British supporter Nigel Farage to let slide. (https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/trump-supporter-nigel-farage-says-president-wrong-to-launch-unfair-attack-on-uk-over-afghan-war/ar-AA1UPhng). The British Right is usually very pro-the military, so it’s dangerous for anyone to criticise the soldiery, except perhaps on the grounds that there aren’t enough of them. So Trump scored a spectacular own goal here; in Europe, anyway.

Are other own goals coming? One would think that the recent ICE attacks on terrified immigrant families granted refuge in churches in Texas and elsewhere (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-church-raids-arrests-lawsuit-b2798388.html), as well as ICE agents’ murders of an innocent mother and a nurse in Minnesota just the other day, might provoke the ‘Christian’ Right against this kind of (at least proto-) Fascism. Nothing else – petitions, the courts, huge demonstrations, foreign opinion – seems to be making much impact so far. I still have some hope for the part of America (50%?) that I’ve long admired. But that is rapidly seeping away.