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Telegraph
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Want to understand Trumpism? This is the book you need
The 2016 election wasn't the first occasion on which Donald Trump had considered running to be president of the United States. He seriously played with the idea in the run-up to the 2000 election too. Oprah Winfrey might have been his running mate. Trump was a member of the Republican Party back then, but not a happy one. In October 1999, aged 53, he bolted to join the upstart Reform Party because he thought the GOP was becoming 'too crazy'. But he also feared that the frontrunner to be the Reform presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, was mad. 'It's just incredible that anyone can embrace this guy,' Trump said at the time. 'He's a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays… He would only get the staunch Right wacko vote.' It didn't escape Trump's notice that David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wanted to join the Reform Party. Trump left it again in February 2000, after mere months. Trump, in the 1990s, was politically heterodox. Over the decade, he donated equally to the Democrats and the Republicans. He supported Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He held liberal positions on abortion and healthcare. But he was also sceptical about immigration and free trade; his longest-held political conviction was that America was being ripped off by other countries. And on the latter issues he found himself politically aligned with Buchanan, who had been Richard Nixon's speechwriter in the late 1960s and coined the phrase the 'Silent Majority'. Buchanan features among the leading characters in When the Clock Broke, a spry and superbly written book on 1990s American politics by John Ganz. It's the best account I have ever read on the origins of Trumpism. I confess that I didn't come into the book with great expectations: my knowledge of Ganz was largely confined to seeing him being rude to random Right-wing people on X, and knowing that he had a Substack account dedicated to the study of fascism. But this is a substantial work of intellectual history. Trump haunts almost every page, and Ganz's passionate engagement with personalities and ideas he clearly deplores – he's fiercely Left-wing – is invigorating. Part of the reason why it works is that Ganz shares with the people about whom he writes the conviction that America is in crisis. 'American democracy,' he writes, 'is often spoken of as being in peril.' He agrees, adding: 'Others point out that democracy never fully existed in the first place' and 'this book also agrees with that thesis'. (He merely disagrees with them on what to do about it.) The book's argument is clear and convincing: understanding American politics in the early 1990s is key to understanding Trumpism today. During that period, a group of maverick intellectuals and politicians, from Duke and Buchanan to Ross Perot and Murray Rothbard, waged war against the conservative establishment. 'For them,' Ganz writes, 'the 1980s represented a betrayal: they understood Ronald Reagan as the champion of the economic interests of and cultural values of white Middle Americans, but [the latter] now seemed worse off than ever.' The country was in dire straits. The streets were plagued by crime and drug use. Recession and unemployment crippled hard-working families. Political correctness in universities and the media demonised American culture and history. Ross Perot became the 'populist billionaire', winning over 18 per cent of the vote in the 1992 election on a platform of reducing the national debt and slashing bureaucracy. Sam Francis, one of the intellectual figures behind this reaction to the conservative establishment, wrote that 'the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.' True, they were revolutionary in one sense, but they were arch-conservative in others. Some of them described themselves as the Old Right, and contrasted themselves with the neo-cons who often, as Ganz writes, were 'formerly liberals who had only recently fled the Democratic Party out of disgust for the New Left and fear of the Black Power movement.' Buchanan and his ilk considered them to be newcomers who 'were barely conservatives in the first place'. The New Right, by contrast, were essentially paleocons who 'traced their lineage to the isolationist, pre-war America Firsters'. They anathematised a range of things, from 'the New Deal' to the 'Great Society'. They despised mass immigration, free trade and foreign interventionism, all of which had become emblematic of the Reagan -Bush GOP from 1981 to 1993. (Reagan famously gave amnesty to almost three million illegal immigrants in 1987.) The person who embodied the out-of-touch conservative establishment more than anyone else was George HW Bush, Reagan's vice-president from 1981 to 1989 then president himself from 1989 to 1993. He was patrician by blood and upbringing; he had been raised in New England, had been educated at private schools and at Yale, and had gone from plum job to plum job, becoming director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, and eventually the man in the Oval Office. It was no surprise that Buchanan referred to Bush as 'King George' – which, for obvious historical reasons, may be the worst insult one can bestow on an American leader. Bush's tax hike in the early 1990s, after promising he wouldn't raise them – 'Read my lips', and so on – was a particularly egregious betrayal. Buchanan said of Bush: 'He is yesterday and we are tomorrow. He is a globalist and we are nationalists.' In 1992, Buchanan demanded a wall along the border with Mexico and a five-year moratorium on legal migration. He won 37 per cent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and declared in a speech there: 'When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.' The rest of the 1990s would, however, prove a great disappointment for these insurgents. Perot did much worse in 1996 than he had in 1992. Buchanan also tried to run on a GOP ticket again, but was unable to capture the same level of support and enthusiasm as he had four years before. Francis and Rothbard remained relatively obscure. And, of course, the Reform Party did poorly in the 2000 election. In retrospect, 1992 was the high noon for these particular renegades, at least on an individual level. Yet their ideas and convictions would come back with a renewed force in the mid-2010s, and dominate the Republican Party today. 'On the one hand,' Ganz writes, the influence of Francis on the 21st-century GOP is abundantly clear. 'There's a conception of the party as a national populist movement on behalf of the Middle American working class led by a Caesarist president to smash the power of the 'globalist' professional and managerial elite.' And then there's the influence of Rothbard, who had 'a radical libertarian project of administrative state demolition beyond a populist façade'. In other words, Buchanan was John the Baptist to Trump's Messiah. Thirty years on, the Republican party is no longer the party of Reagan and the Bushes: Trump rules unopposed. When the Clock Broke is a brilliant explanation of his rise.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Want to understand Trumpism? This is the book you need
The 2016 election wasn't the first occasion on which Donald Trump had considered running to be president of the United States. He seriously played with the idea in the run-up to the 2000 election too. Oprah Winfrey might have been his running mate. Trump was a member of the Republican Party back then, but not a happy one. In October 1999, aged 53, he bolted to join the upstart Reform Party because he thought the GOP was becoming 'too crazy'. But he also feared that the frontrunner to be the Reform presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, was mad. 'It's just incredible that anyone can embrace this guy,' Trump said at the time. 'He's a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays… He would only get the staunch Right wacko vote.' It didn't escape Trump's notice that David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wanted to join the Reform Party. Trump left it again in February 2000, after mere months. Trump, in the 1990s, was politically heterodox. Over the decade, he donated equally to the Democrats and the Republicans. He supported Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He held liberal positions on abortion and healthcare. But he was also sceptical about immigration and free trade; his longest-held political conviction was that America was being ripped off by other countries. And on the latter issues he found himself politically aligned with Buchanan, who had been Richard Nixon's speechwriter in the late 1960s and coined the phrase the 'Silent Majority'. Buchanan features among the leading characters in When the Clock Broke, a spry and superbly written book on 1990s American politics by John Ganz. It's the best account I have ever read on the origins of Trumpism. I confess that I didn't come into the book with great expectations: my knowledge of Ganz was largely confined to seeing him being rude to random Right-wing people on X, and knowing that he had a Substack account dedicated to the study of fascism. But this is a substantial work of intellectual history. Trump haunts almost every page, and Ganz's passionate engagement with personalities and ideas he clearly deplores – he's fiercely Left-wing – is invigorating. Part of the reason why it works is that Ganz shares with the people about whom he writes the conviction that America is in crisis. 'American democracy,' he writes, 'is often spoken of as being in peril.' He agrees, adding: 'Others point out that democracy never fully existed in the first place' and 'this book also agrees with that thesis'. (He merely disagrees with them on what to do about it.) The book's argument is clear and convincing: understanding American politics in the early 1990s is key to understanding Trumpism today. During that period, a group of maverick intellectuals and politicians, from Duke and Buchanan to Ross Perot and Murray Rothbard, waged war against the conservative establishment. 'For them,' Ganz writes, 'the 1980s represented a betrayal: they understood Ronald Reagan as the champion of the economic interests of and cultural values of white Middle Americans, but [the latter] now seemed worse off than ever.' The country was in dire straits. The streets were plagued by crime and drug use. Recession and unemployment crippled hard-working families. Political correctness in universities and the media demonised American culture and history. Ross Perot became the 'populist billionaire', winning over 18 per cent of the vote in the 1992 election on a platform of reducing the national debt and slashing bureaucracy. Sam Francis, one of the intellectual figures behind this reaction to the conservative establishment, wrote that 'the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.' True, they were revolutionary in one sense, but they were arch-conservative in others. Some of them described themselves as the Old Right, and contrasted themselves with the neo-cons who often, as Ganz writes, were 'formerly liberals who had only recently fled the Democratic Party out of disgust for the New Left and fear of the Black Power movement.' Buchanan and his ilk considered them to be newcomers who 'were barely conservatives in the first place'. The New Right, by contrast, were essentially paleocons who 'traced their lineage to the isolationist, pre-war America Firsters'. They anathematised a range of things, from 'the New Deal' to the 'Great Society'. They despised mass immigration, free trade and foreign interventionism, all of which had become emblematic of the Reagan-Bush GOP from 1981 to 1993. (Reagan famously gave amnesty to almost three million illegal immigrants in 1987.) The person who embodied the out-of-touch conservative establishment more than anyone else was George HW Bush, Reagan's vice-president from 1981 to 1989 then president himself from 1989 to 1993. He was patrician by blood and upbringing; he had been raised in New England, had been educated at private schools and at Yale, and had gone from plum job to plum job, becoming director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, and eventually the man in the Oval Office. It was no surprise that Buchanan referred to Bush as 'King George' – which, for obvious historical reasons, may be the worst insult one can bestow on an American leader. Bush's tax hike in the early 1990s, after promising he wouldn't raise them – 'Read my lips', and so on – was a particularly egregious betrayal. Buchanan said of Bush: 'He is yesterday and we are tomorrow. He is a globalist and we are nationalists.' In 1992, Buchanan demanded a wall along the border with Mexico and a five-year moratorium on legal migration. He won 37 per cent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and declared in a speech there: 'When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.' The rest of the 1990s would, however, prove a great disappointment for these insurgents. Perot did much worse in 1996 than he had in 1992. Buchanan also tried to run on a GOP ticket again, but was unable to capture the same level of support and enthusiasm as he had four years before. Francis and Rothbard remained relatively obscure. And, of course, the Reform Party did poorly in the 2000 election. In retrospect, 1992 was the high noon for these particular renegades, at least on an individual level. Yet their ideas and convictions would come back with a renewed force in the mid-2010s, and dominate the Republican Party today. 'On the one hand,' Ganz writes, the influence of Francis on the 21st-century GOP is abundantly clear. 'There's a conception of the party as a national populist movement on behalf of the Middle American working class led by a Caesarist president to smash the power of the 'globalist' professional and managerial elite.' And then there's the influence of Rothbard, who had 'a radical libertarian project of administrative state demolition beyond a populist façade'. In other words, Buchanan was John the Baptist to Trump's Messiah. Thirty years on, the Republican party is no longer the party of Reagan and the Bushes: Trump rules unopposed. When the Clock Broke is a brilliant explanation of his rise. When the Clock Broke is published by Penguin at £10.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Glasgow Times
10-05-2025
- Business
- Glasgow Times
St Enoch Centre staff raise funds for Street Soccer Scotland
St Enoch Centre employees took part in the Kiltwalk challenge to raise funds for Street Soccer Scotland, a social enterprise that delivers football-inspired training programmes to socially disadvantaged groups in Scotland. The team, made up of office personnel, security staff, and more, walked 23 miles from Glasgow Green to Balloch in support of the charity. Read more: Glasgow ranked as second most generous city in UK Vicky Colquhoun, St Enoch Centre office manager, who participated in the event, said: "We were proud to take part in this year's Mighty Stride to fundraise for our charity partner of the year, Street Soccer Scotland. "The Kiltwalk is one of Glasgow's most iconic events, and it was inspiring to walk alongside so many others taking on the challenge in support of their charity of choice." The team have created an online fundraising page, which is still available to donate to at (Image: Supplied) The St Enoch Centre is also expected to host a pop-up shop for Street Soccer Scotland later in the year. The shop will sell pre-loved football shirts and sports kit to raise money for the organisation's social programmes. Read more: Glasgow mum tells of son's measles vaccination experience David Duke, chief executive officer of Street Soccer Scotland, said: "We are immensely grateful to St Enoch Centre for all of their fundraising activities. "The centre's support as our commercial partner of the year has a significant impact on the programmes we deliver to the most vulnerable members of society. "Together, we have the power to make a meaningful impact, combat social exclusion, and transform lives. "Stay tuned for future fundraising events in collaboration with St. Enoch Centre this year."
Scottish Sun
28-04-2025
- Business
- Scottish Sun
Football charity encourages Scots to donate old kits to help vulnerable people
A FOOTBALL charity hopes fans get a kick out of their new scheme – selling retro kits to help bring vulnerable people into the beautiful game. Street Soccer yesterday announced the launch of Kitback, a new project taking advantage of the popularity of old strips to raise much-needed funds. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 David Duke MBE founded Street Soccer Scotland 16 years ago. Credit: Andrew Barr 2 It's hoped the scheme will help thousands of people. Credit: Andrew Barr People can donate their pre-loved shirts at dedicated drop-off points or by post which will then be upcycled and sold with one kit supporting a for a whole month. Founder David Duke launched the charity 16 years ago after living in shelters and has since helped more than 25,000 folk going through their own struggles, such as addiction, homelessness, mental health and poverty. The charity boss, 45, said: 'We're currently in an environment where there's funding cuts at various levels and when you try to align the demand on your services with funding cuts, it doesn't really work. 'For us, rather than standing still and reducing services, it was about how we could be a wee bit more proactive to raise funds. Every time we get a shirt donated, that effectively allows somebody to come to Street Soccer for a month. 'When someone donates a kit or buys a kit, it unlocks an opportunity. The key thing for us is to make it affordable and all the money and every bit of profit goes towards supporting Street Soccer.' The initiative has already been backed by football clubs and businesses all over the UK. Fulham FC Foundation has become the first professional club to donate to Kitback with others set to follow suit in the coming weeks and months. Anyone who donates a kit is also added to the newsletter list so they can see the real impact of their kindness. David said: 'At the Euros I must have bought about three or four different Scotland shirts but how often do I wear them? They're just sitting there. 'Rather than clogging up your space, they could do a lot of good if donated. Not everybody can afford to support charities with cash. We need to realise that the cost-of-living crisis is affecting everybody and that this is just as valuable. 'It can create a circular economy with zero waste too. There's going to be loads of accessible drop-off points. And again, the great thing about it when you drop it off is that we'll keep a note here. What does Rangers takeover mean for the club - finance expert speaks out 'We'll add you to the supporters' group so that every six months we'll produce an impact report saying how much donated kit we've received and how much money. 'It's about building a relationship with the people who actually give it to you. We just don't want to say thanks for that, see you later. We want to bring people on the journey and share what we're trying to do. Even just one football shirt being kept in play for nine months is a 30 per cent decrease in its carbon emission. 'It's a win for the people and it's a win for the planet. And it's not often you get the opportunity to achieve that.' David hopes the project proves to be a major success and that it'll help support more people who need their help. He'd love for the issues facing folk to go away and for nobody to be struggling. But he's ready to fill the gap that other services aren't providing until then. The website to buy retro shirts goes live next month and he is calling on people to get involved and make a difference. He said: 'Street Soccer was based on my own experience of how football can help you navigate through difficult times. "I was a young person living in a homeless hostel in Glasgow and football was like a rope that pulled me out of a dark hole. FOOTIE FREEDOM BRIAN Pearson credits Street Scotland with helping him beat addiction and find hope through football. The volunteer, 49, takes weekly training sessions for the charity after being put through his UEFA coaching badges. He's now an integral part of the charity and works with players from the age of 16 up to pensioners – including his own son Ruari, 17, and dad Brian Sr, 68. Brian, from Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, said: 'It's about working together to get the best out of everybody. It's not so much games, it's more just fun. Street Soccer is about supporting and promoting teamwork. You feel like you're part of a family.' The coach, who had two spinal surgeries, added: 'I'm trying to get as far as I can with the walking stick. I don't have any feeling in my left leg. It's totally numb with the nerve damage and the pain can be phenomenal. 'But my purpose is to see the smile on my guys and lassies' faces on a Monday at the session. It's amazing and it sets you up for the rest of the week.' 'The bigger Street Soccer becomes, it shows that there's still things that need to be fixed in our society. Like making sure people have the opportunity to be part of something and have access to mental health services. 'We're plugging quite a lot of gaps so I think the ambition for Street Soccer - and it's been the same ever since day one - is that there's somebody out there who might be struggling, disconnected or cut off needing some sort of support service. 'But they maybe don't know how to access it because they're isolated. Our strategy is the same every day - there's somebody out there who needs our support and how do we find them? 'This new project is exciting. We're not just doing it because we think it's a good idea, we're doing it because we need to do something. 'There's people there who need support and this is an easy way for anyone to help. I think 99 per cent of society wants to make the world a better place, it's just about how we can help them do that.' Follow Kitback on Instagram for more info.
STV News
28-04-2025
- Sport
- STV News
Football charity launches recycled football kit initiative
Award winning football charity Street Soccer has launched a new initiative involving upcycled football shirts. Kitback will collect pre-owned football shirts from donors at dedicated drop-off points or by post and upcycle them in preparation for resale. The shirts will then be put up for sale and all proceeds will go towards supporting people suffering from homelessness, poor mental health, social exclusion, substance use and poverty. The charity, which has had kits donated from English Premier League side Fulham FC, is urging people to donate their old kits to 'empower peoples lives'. STV News Brian Pearson has been involved in Street Soccer for four years. Street Soccer founder, David Duke, from Govan, said: 'Kitback is more than just a campaign; it's a movement that brings together our shared passion for football and our collective commitment to helping our local communities. 'Football has a unique ability to unite people behind social causes and through Kitback, supporters can make a real difference. 'By donating your pre-loved football shirts and buying from Kitback when adding a new kit to your collection, you're not only reducing environmental waste but also helping to empower and enrich people's lives through everything we do at Street Soccer.' Street Soccer started with a drop-in session in Townhead in Glasgow city centre in 2009 and has now expanded to 63 projects running every week. The charity has helped over 25,000 people since it was launched 16 years ago, including Brian Pearson, who struggled with addiction for 20 years before the initiative 'gave him a purpose'. 'I think the guys and girls that come to our sessions, they suffer the same problems, the same issues, and whether it be isolation, mental health, addiction and so with that having, you know, the same issues as these guys, it helped me go forward', the 49-year-old said. 'I used tricks that they knew, how to keep yourself clean, how to keep yourself motivated and when Street Soccer said to me, don't worry about your mobility, move onto the coaching side of things, it seems to have worked well for myself. 'I'm still involved, heavily involved. It's such a sense of community. When you're at Street Soccer, you feel a connection with the team. 'Street Soccer has given me a purpose, but it's time for me to push the rest. 'What I'm doing is available for everyone. There's no limits and you may think you can't, but you can. It's there on a weekly basis, there's thousands of players now.' Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
