Wake Up

When I left CNN in 2014, returned to the UK and was no longer of any use to him, he rang me repeatedly to check how I was doing. During his 2016 election campaign, he gave me the only two British TV interviews he conducted as a presidential candidate, and since becoming president, he’s given me the only three British TV interviews he’s conducted as leader of the free world. He even invited me onto Air Force One to do one of them, which was an extraordinary experience. So, he treats his friends as well as he treats his enemies badly. Punch him in the face, metaphorically, and he’ll delightedly keep punching back for the rest of time. Conflict is something Trump revels in.

It’s not easy being friends with the president of the United States when he’s as divisive as Trump. I’ve been pilloried in the media for it, abused mercilessly on Twitter, and even been subjected to verbal tirades in the street. But I’ve stayed friends with him because I like him, and he’s been good to me, and because, contrary to popular myth, I’ve never let it stop me criticising him in print or on air when I feel the need to – often quite sharply, as I’ve done on issues like gun control, climate change, trophy hunting, his call for a Muslim ban, his ‘grab ’em by the p*ssy’ Access Hollywood tape, his ‘fake news’ attacks on the media and his ban on transgenders in the military. I’ve written over 100 columns about him for the Daily Mail’s US website and around half of them have been critical. I’ve also made it clear many times that I wouldn’t personally vote for Trump, even if I could, as I’m not a Republican. But I think he’s an extraordinary political character and find myself agreeing with as much of what he says and does as I disagree.

I see both good and bad in Trump, and right and wrong. In some ways, he is one of the least right-wing Republican presidents ever. For example, he was the first one to reference the LGBT community in his inauguration speech (which made his later transgender military ban all the more incomprehensible). His decision to kill Soleimani is a rarity in an otherwise militarily calm tenure in which Trump’s gone out of his way to avoid the wars that most US leaders get sucked into, withdrawing most US troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and forging peace with conventional US enemies like North Korea and Russia. He’s presided over a very successful economy, achieved record low unemployment levels and launched what many see as an entirely justified trade war with China, a country that has been economically ransacking America for several decades. And yet a minute cannot pass without the ‘woke’ community being mortally offended by Trump. He seems to turn many liberals into permanent gibbering wrecks of blazing fury.

In fact, it was Trump’s election which exposed one of the biggest problems at the core of wokedom: modern liberals, especially famous ones, are very sensitive. Not a minute of any day goes by without them being outraged by something. And that something is usually Donald Trump. The wild, foot-stomping, shrieking mania that greets the president’s every utterance and movement is beyond anything I have ever witnessed in global politics.

Now, let me say this: much of the adverse reaction to Trump’s presidency is perfectly understandable and acceptable. He’s an inflammatory, deliberately provocative character who likes nothing better than winding up what he calls the ‘sneering elites’ into a slathering lather of blind rage.

So, I have no issue with people complaining or protesting about him, or with journalists holding his factual feet to the fire. But hysteria never won an argument, and I say that as someone who has occasionally got hysterical about stuff and never won those arguments.

MONDAY 6 JANUARY

I awoke at 1 am, still jetlagged, to watch Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood. The acid-tongued British comedian is one of the very few celebrities in the world who finds the whole idea of some kind of superior Planet Celebrity utterly ridiculous and revels in tearing to pieces the inherent pomposity and hypocrisy that lies at its heart.

As such, he is the perfect awards show host, because he doesn’t give a rat’s arse about offending the world’s biggest stars sitting right in front of him like rabbits cowering in the middle of a motorway as a juggernaut lorry bears down on them with no intention of stopping even though the driver can see their terrified little eyes.

Gervais set out his stall a few days ago by saying: ‘It [the Globes] is a room full of the biggest virtue-signallers and hypocrites in the world, so I’ve got to go after that.’ And go after that he most definitely did. His opening monologue only lasted seven minutes and forty-two seconds. But that was long enough for him to burst the absurdly two-faced PC-crazed bubble that surrounds modern Hollywood. It was brutal, vicious … and exactly what that crowd needed, even if their shocked, frozen (and not just from all the Botox) faces suggested they’d just stumbled into hell on earth. It was also what we all needed watching back at home.

Gervais point-blank refuses to bow to the modern-day anti-free-speech ultra-woke McCarthyism, ranting against it all day every day on Twitter with a mixture of incredulity, defiance and savagery. He doesn’t care about all the flak he takes because his view is that comedy is comedy, jokes are jokes and thin-skinned little snowflakes who constantly throw their offended toys out of the pram should simply be ignored because their outrage doesn’t – and shouldn’t – trump his right to freedom of speech. And he doesn’t care how rich, powerful or famous you are – everyone cops it.

That’s why Ricky Gervais is the most successful comedian on the planet. From the moment Gervais appeared on stage and flashed that mischievous grin, it was clear he was going to be taking no prisoners. Though ironically, he started by targeting an actual recent prisoner. ‘I came here in a limo tonight,’ he quipped, ‘and the licence plate was made by Felicity Huffman.’ Huffman, a former Golden Globes-winning actress who is married to actor William H. Macy, was jailed in 2019 for her part in an infamous college exam cheating scandal after she admitted paying for a proctor to correct SAT questions answered incorrectly by her daughter.

‘No, shush,’ taunted Gervais as the audience reacted in dismay. ‘It’s her daughter I feel sorry for. That must be the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to her … and her dad was in Wild Hogs.’

Having immediately broken his solemn pre-show promise not to attack any individuals – a promise I knew he’d only made to throw everyone off their guard – Gervais sprayed a machine gun of mockery at big names in the audience, calling Joe Pesci ‘Baby Yoda’, ridiculing Martin Scorsese for his lack of height and ribbing Leonardo DiCaprio for his preference for youthful girlfriends.

‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nearly three hours long,’ he smirked. ‘Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere and by the end his date was too old for him.’ As the camera panned to a clearly embarrassed DiCaprio, ruthless Gervais stuck the boot in further. ‘Even Prince Andrew was, like, “Come on, Leo, mate. You’re nearly fifty, son!”’ (The prince had been accused of sexually assaulting young girls, which he denied.) By now, I was laughing so hard I went into a volatile coughing fit. But actors are relatively easy targets. It was when Gervais directed his fire at Hollywood itself that he excelled himself.

He accused the movie executives in the room of being ‘terrified of Ronan Farrow’ (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose investigative #MeToo journalism brought down Harvey Weinstein and a number of other powerful people) and branded them ‘perverts’, sneering, ‘He’s coming for ya!’ Then he suggested Andrew’s multi-millionaire paedophile and star-befriender pal Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, and as the audience booed (again), he scoffed, ‘Shut up, I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care … you had to make your own way here in your own plane, didn’t you?’

He brilliantly mocked the town’s dubiously self-interested reactive diversity initiatives. ‘We were going to do an In Memoriam this year but when I saw the list of people who had died, it wasn’t diverse enough. No, it was mostly white people and I thought, nah, not on my watch.’ Gervais even hammered his own employers for the night, the Hollywood Foreign Press, as ‘very, very racist’ in reference to the lack of people of colour in many award categories, said ‘most films are awful’ – at an event supposedly celebrating film! – and railed against the new brand of corporate giants dominating Tinseltown.

‘Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show,’ he said, ‘a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing … made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.’ Ironically, Apple boss Tim Cook – who has denied the company uses sweatshops – looked rather sweaty himself when the cameras were on him in the audience.

Then Gervais rounded on the hypocritical stars again.

‘You all say you’re woke but the companies you work for – I mean, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?’

More gasps, but Gervais wasn’t finished with them yet.

‘So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God, and f*ck off, OK?!’

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This was a Hollywood awards night, where stars are sycophantically praised not unceremoniously buried. This was intended as another chance to virtue-signal and remind the world how awful Trump is, not themselves! But Gervais knows that celebrities and comedians whacking Trump are two-a-penny. Far rarer is the star who shines a light on the stinking hypocrisy of Hollywood itself, the place that loves to take the high moral ground yet itself lurks in a sewer of immorality. It takes courage to do this in a town that can make or break entertainers’ careers, real balls of glistening steel.

‘Our next presenter starred in Netflix’s Bird Box,’ Gervais said towards the end, introducing Sandra Bullock. ‘A movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing. Sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.’

As the audience gasped and groaned again in more fake ‘what, me?’ horror – beautifully proving his point – before booing him, Gervais jeered back, ‘You did it, I didn’t, you did it …’

TUESDAY 7 JANUARY

The new year has begun for Good Morning Britain the way the old one ended, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet ministers refusing to come on the show. They’re still sulking after our fearless correspondent Jonathan Swain chased Boris into a large fridge at a dairy farm on the eve of the election as we tried to get him to honour his repeated public promises to give us an interview.

They should heed the words of former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, who writes in his new book, Downsizing, ‘I knew for a fact that many Westminster politicians disliked appearing on GMB, fearing the programme’s notoriously tough interviews. The combative Piers Morgan and the forensic Susanna Reid were indeed a formidable duo – I’d seen many a guest shrink as they received a breakfast-time grilling. But I’d always enjoyed the experience. I liked sparring with Piers, and I admired Susanna’s incisive line of questioning.’

When I thanked him on Twitter for his comments, he replied, ‘I honestly think Labour members should judge our leadership and deputy leadership candidates on their ability to handle tough interviews.’ I couldn’t agree more. What’s baffling about the ban is that many politicians have told me in the past they get more feedback from constituents after they do GMB than any of the political shows, and particular praise if they give as good as they get.

I don’t view these encounters with a cynical Jeremy Paxman ‘why are these bastards lying to me?’ mindset, but more a ‘let’s rough them up a bit and see what they’re made of’ attitude. The good ones will rise to the challenge and see their reputations enhanced, the bad ones will wilt under pressure and reveal themselves as not fit for ministerial purpose. But frankly, if they don’t have the stomach for an argument on breakfast television, how on earth would they cope with handling a serious crisis?

WEDNESDAY 8 JANUARY

Iran has responded to the killing of Soleimani by launching missile strikes at US bases in Iraq. It’s being seen as a ‘proportionate response’ and not a dramatic escalation. In other words, Iran has heeded President Trump’s words of dire warning if they try anything foolish, and blinked.

I think Trump was absolutely right to take him out. Soleimani was the world’s most dangerous terrorist. As such, he was no different ideologically from other terror leaders like Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden who Obama took out with SEAL Team 6 special forces in Pakistan, or ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who blew himself up with a suicide vest two months ago when US special forces, on Trump’s orders, tracked him down in Syria’s Idlib province. Like Bin Laden and Al-Baghdadi, Soleimani’s life was devoted to killing people via terrorism, including many Americans. And like them, he was killed to stop him directing more terror acts.

Yet unlike Bin Laden, Soleimani’s death has been met with howls of protests from the world’s liberals. Within minutes of it being confirmed, out sprang the usual suspect, mouth-foaming, Trump-loathing celebrities who erupt in breathless rage every time he speaks, tweets or does anything, often with little knowledge of what has actually happened.

Actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan actually apologised to Iran. ‘Dear Iran,’ she tweeted, ‘the USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. Fifty-two per cent of us humbly apologise. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us.’

When this bizarre mea culpa prompted understandable outrage, she retorted, ‘Of course Soleimani was an evil man who did evil things. But that at the moment is not the f*cking point.’

It’s not? McGowan later backtracked, explaining, ‘OK, so I freaked out because we may have impending war … I do not want any more American soldiers killed, that’s it.’

Of course, that is precisely why Trump had Soleimani killed. Ms McGowan wasn’t the only one who sounded confused. Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback famed for his kneeling protests against racial injustice during the US national anthem, accused Trump of having a racist motivation.

‘There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks on Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism,’ he tweeted.

What?! Kaepernick either doesn’t know, or chose to deliberately ignore, that for many years Iran has been committing terror attacks on black and brown people for the expansion of its own imperialist agenda in the Middle East. This action had nothing to do with racism. Nor do I believe, as some are suggesting, that it was designed to create a distraction from Trump’s imminent impeachment trial in the US Senate, due to start next week, which seems to be helping not hindering him in the polls anyway.

No, I share the view of retired General David Petraeus, one of America’s finest military minds, who said Soleimani’s death was ‘bigger than Bin Laden, bigger than Al-Baghdadi’ and a ‘very significant effort to re-establish deterrence’. Petraeus explained, ‘Soleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify the so-called Shia crescent stretching from Iran to Iraq, through Syria into southern Lebanon. He is responsible for providing explosives and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition partners, so his death is of enormous significance. Many people had rightly questioned whether America’s deterrence had eroded somewhat because of the relatively insignificant responses to the earlier actions.’

I agree. President Trump called Iran’s menacing, threatening, cocky, murderous bluff – to put them back in their box. He gave them the ‘slap in the face’ they deserved and warrants praise, not hypocritical liberal outrage, for taking such bold action. Far from making the world a more dangerous place, the world just got a lot safer without the presence of a loathsome terror leader like Qasem Soleimani.

It should be a moment to unite Americans, but it’s not. And once again, woke outrage spews across social media, furthering division and threatening to inhibit any discussion on what is an incredibly important moment in US politics. Other Trump-bashing stars, from singer John Legend to actors John Cusack and Alyssa Milano, also felt compelled to tell the world how disgusting it was that Soleimani had been killed. Oh, they all agreed Soleimani was a very bad man who killed lots of people, but they also think he should have been kept alive – to do what exactly? Continue killing lots more people?

Epitomising this seemingly absurd contradictory attitude was Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose initial response to the news was this: ‘Soleimani was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.’ One day later, Warren had a re-think and said that, in fact, the bad guy was President Trump, who had ‘assassinated a senior foreign military official’. It’s no coincidence that Warren’s dramatic change in tone came after 24 hours of rage from fellow liberals horrified that she had told the truth about Soleimani’s murderous record. But when repeatedly pressed yesterday by Meghan McCain on The View as to whether Soleimani was a terrorist, Warren finally said, ‘Of course he was.’

So, let me get this straight: Soleimani was a mass-murdering terrorist responsible for killing thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, but should be left alone because it might ‘escalate the situation with Iran’? I don’t remember the risk of escalating conflict being an issue with the killing of Bin Laden, who was also responsible for murdering thousands of people, including many Americans. No, when Obama ordered the execution of Bin Laden, liberals cheered him around the world. But Trump Derangement Syndrome, as the president’s supporters call this kind of behaviour, dictates there must be a very different response when the current occupant of the White House kills a terror leader.

Trump can’t win. Or, rather, he can win but his opponents will never give him any credit for winning. It’s been like this ever since he was elected president, prompting many liberals to collapse into a form of spontaneous anaphylactic shock from which they still haven’t recovered. These included a lot of entertainers, people from the worlds of film, television and music whose political opinions have never seemed so important – to themselves.

I’ll never forget a video that went viral the week after Trump’s stunning election victory featuring Yoko Ono’s calm, measured response to the news. It lasted about 15 seconds and consisted of Yoko emitting a long, strangled, mournful, high-pitched scream like a malfunctioning kettle exploding. Her agonised reaction perfectly epitomised the ludicrously over-the-top global meltdown by the planet’s celebrities to the result of a fair, open and democratic election. And it was only rivalled for insanity by an event organised a year on from Trump’s win entitled ‘Scream helplessly at the sky on the anniversary of the election’ in which thousands of Trump-hating liberals in cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia went outside, stared upwards and shouted their little heads off in rage. What could better illustrate the woke mindset than literally screaming because you don’t get what you want?

This raging intolerance has manifested itself in a very dangerous manner, with direct inferences that Trump should be assassinated. Four sitting presidents – one in 12 of the 45 men who have held the office – have actually been murdered. I remain very concerned that Trump may become the fifth, such is the viciously violent vitriol aimed his way by those who should know better.

It was Madonna who started this disturbing trend by screaming at the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 that she thought of ‘blowing up the White House’, although she quickly backtracked, claiming her remark had been taken out of context and that she had spoken in ‘metaphor’. Following her outrageous outburst, which attracted global headlines, death threats were aimed at the new president on an unprecedented scale. Global artificial intelligence firm Dataminr reported that, in the next two weeks alone, more than 12,000 posts with the words ‘assassinate Trump’ were made on Twitter. The threats have carried on coming, many of them far more serious than a Twitter post, with the Secret Service working 24/7 to stop myriad plots to attack POTUS. Yet this hasn’t stopped supposedly intelligent people from fanning the flames.

Comedian Kathy Griffin posted a photograph of herself clutching an image of Trump’s severed, blood-splattered head. It was a just a joke, she wailed, when all hell broke loose. Really, Ms Griffin? It’s ‘funny’ to hold a US president’s severed head up to a camera at a time when ISIS barbarians were doing exactly that to fellow Americans?

‘This is vile and wrong,’ tweeted Chelsea Clinton in a very rare show of solidarity with Trump after Griffin’s stunt. ‘It is never funny to joke about killing a president.’ There speaks someone who had to live for eight years as a young girl in the White House with the constant terrifying fear that someone might try to kill her father.

As outrage grew, and Trump and his family expressed horror over what she’d done, Griffin resorted to the natural preferred woke defence playbook of victimhood; she claimed she was being bullied by old, sexist and misogynist white men. Oh, and irony of ironies, she was now receiving death threats! She briefly apologised but later took back the apology.

In the short term, Griffin’s career took a hit, but once she revved up the victim card, and went on the attack against Trump, she became a liberal heroine and is now even more famous and successful than she was before the severed head fiasco. Her behaviour exemplifies the horrible self-righteousness that pervades ‘wokies’. They don’t just think they’re right – they know they’re right. And they don’t just think those who disagree are wrong, they know they’re wrong. They also believe those who disagree with them are all dumb, bigoted morons who must be shamed, abused and preferably cancelled.

Trump brings out the worst in them all, just as he also brings out the worst in the US media, who exposed themselves during his presidential run, with a few notable exceptions, as a bunch of ratings- and circulation-hungry Dr Frankensteins that created and ravenously fuelled the monster of Trump the presidential candidate – before equally ravenously trying to kill him off when they suddenly realised to their horror he might actually win, and in a massive collective guilt trip ever since have spent his entire presidency trying to bring him down. In doing so, they have fallen into his trap. ‘Good publicity is preferable to bad,’ said Trump in his bestselling book The Art of the Deal, ‘but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.’

Trump’s toxic relationship with the mainstream media in America now resembles a mutually abusive marriage. They can’t live with each other with a constant undercurrent of visceral hostility, but nor can they live without each other. As a journalist for 35 years, I don’t like Trump branding the media ‘fake news’, even if it’s justified when a story turns out to be plain wrong. And I hate him calling the media ‘the enemy of the people’. That’s just downright dangerous. But the media, dominated by liberals, doesn’t help itself with its obsessional 24/7 coverage of Trump over things like his supposed collusion with Russia to fix the 2016 election, which turned out to be a massive nothing-burger.