Donald trump

Donald Trump has brought back the Presidential Fitness Test for American children, once used in state schools to gauge young people’s health and athleticism with one-mile runs, sit-ups and stretching exercises. He could usefully add elements of the early training invented by the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus to create disciplined, physically and mentally resilient soldiers and citizens. Every baby was examined for fitness. They were trained not to fuss about food, or be frightened of the dark when left alone, or to get angry or cry. At seven, they joined bands in which they grew up together while their elders registered their progress in obedience and courage.

When I was a young man, the claim that Britain was in danger of becoming the 51st state was a political slur mainly thrown about by the left, particularly those who objected to the presence of US military bases. But there was some anti-American sentiment on the right, too – Enoch Powell, for instance, had a dislike of America’s hostility to the Empire that dated back to his service in the second world war. I’m even guilty of some anti--American prejudice myself and wrote a memoir in which I tried to convey that my failure to take Manhattan in the mid-1990s was because I wasn’t willing to sell my soul to Mammon. Well, I take it all back.

One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a display of military might – which is ‘what dictators do’, according to a general who advised him against it. Trump’s opponents gleefully pointed out that the number of attendees – around 200,000 – was dwarfed by the millions who took part in simultaneous ‘No Kings’ protests in dozens of American cities, a reference to his habit of describing himself as a ‘King’.

Flattery will get you everywhere, as the sycophants that surround Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know. Which makes Elon Musk’s defection rather interesting. Trump’s policies meant that Musk simply could not flatter him any more just to satisfy his inexhaustible self-love, which, says the Greek essayist, biographer and diplomat Plutarch (d. c. ad 120), is what gives the kolax (‘flatterer’) his foothold: the person he wishes to flatter, his victim, will be only too happy for the kolax to endlessly proclaim his qualities and abilities. Naturally, the kolax does not pay attention to poor, obscure or unimportant persons – where is the gain in that? – but only to those with power, engaged in great affairs.