For most of my life, incoming Republican US Presidents replacing outgoing Democrat ones have been depicted as dangerous right-wing demagogues.
It could be argued that George W Bush lived down to the billing after his clueless “neo-con” foreign policy led to disastrous wars which ultimately strengthened Islamist factions and helped Iran to become a regional superpower in the Middle East.
But for a more compelling parallel with the incoming , you have to go back to January 1981 and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
The former film star Reagan was ridiculed as a “cowboy” by liberal US media outlets. Eerily, his inauguration coincided with the release of hostages, just as Trump’s has this week.
In Reagan’s case it was US diplomatic staff being held captive at its embassy in Tehran, in Trump’s, it has been the first of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. But clearly in both cases, the new leader of the free world being seen as a trigger-happy hardman had its uses.
Back at the start of 1981, Britain had already got its own historic right-wing era well underway. Margaret Thatcher was approaching her second anniversary in Downing Street and Reagan’s arrival on the scene bolstered her immensely.
The two of them forged a partnership which ultimately won the Cold War for the forces of freedom and turbo-charged free enterprise economics.
This time around things could hardly be more different. Trump starts his second spell as US President shortly after Britain installed a textbook liberal-left “globalist” leader in .
Many other nations have leaders far more in tune with the new President and his programme. Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Javier Milei in Argentina spring most readily to mind.
The man tasked with selling Starmer and Britain as key allies to Team Trump is, of course, the silver-tongued Peter Mandelson. First he needs to sell himself, as there is reportedly a move within the new President’s inner-circle to reject his nomination by Starmer to be the UK’s new ambassador to Washington.
If Mandelson does overcome that, then there are many issues upon which our two governments now seem poles apart that he must try and bridge: the approach to energy prices and net zero, tax cuts and de-regulation, defence spending, trade policy, the deal to surrender the Chagos Islands and cracking down on illegal immigration are just a few.
The “Woke” onslaught of “diversity, equality and inclusion” programmes – which began in the US but was taken up with enthusiasm by leftists in Britain – is another area where Trump will be taking a diametrically opposite approach from Labour by abolishing them rather than bolstering them.
Starmer is temperamentally completely the opposite from Trump too: a buttoned-up establishment man obsessed with “international law” and devoid of macho swagger or a detectable sense of humour.
Of course, one famous political Brit in Washington this week is far more aligned with Trump and already a familiar face to the President’s entourage.
Peter Mandelson (Image: Getty)
Reform leader has been Trump’s British political best friend ever since the dramatic breakthrough year of 2016, which saw the UK vote to leave the EU and Trump win his first presidential race.
Farage will be trying to persuade Trump to block Starmer’s disgraceful Chagos sovereignty surrender plan and let’s hope he succeeds. He will surely wish also to draw the attention of the British people to Trump’s impending expulsion of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants.
A demonstration of what a country can achieve when it is unencumbered by interference from foreign courts and has a majority of judges onside in its domestic Supreme Court could have a major impact on UK public opinion.
There is every prospect that Trump in his first few weeks will broker a peace deal in too.
Allowing the murderous to exit the war with tracts of former Ukrainian territory under his control will be a bitter pill to swallow.
But with a depleted on the back foot in a war of attrition that is approaching its third anniversary, a serviceable peace deal is now surely in the interests of all sides.
After all, Europe, for all its idealistic talk of staying shoulder-to-shoulder with valiant Ukrainian President Zelensky lacks the willpower or the military power to tip the scales in his favour.
Trump is clearly intending to use his sheer unpredictability to bring Europe’s under-funding of defence to an end if its countries wish to continue sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella (which naturally they do).
Forget the current rule that members should spend two per cent of GDP on defence – which many don’t. Trump is going to demand four or even five per cent in the expectation of forcing defence spending in most European countries up to three per cent.
That will mean bills of tens of billions for extra military funding, including in Britain.
Let us hope that Rachel From Accounts – our Chancellor, Rachel Reeves – has ways of finding that without hitting us with yet more tax rises.
Because tax rises on businesses and citizens are about to get seriously unfashionable. Trump will be cutting taxes and there is every prospect that this will induce a further flood of private sector investment and a boom in American economic growth.
He will be de-regulating radically and slimming down the government payroll too, with leading the work in this area.
Suddenly Labour’s attempted replication of “Bidenomics” – seeking to boost growth through huge government borrowing to fund public investment projects is looking seriously old hat.
Part of Trump’s economic strategy will be based on cheap and plentiful fossil fuel energy, with one of his campaigning slogans being “drill, baby drill”. The contrast with our own Ed Miliband blocking new North Sea oil and gas fields could hardly be starker.
It may be that Trump can be persuaded to exempt the UK from the most painful aspects of his impending “America First” tariff regime. The US is our most important single-country trading partner and outside the stifling embrace of the EU, we are well-placed to reach a high-speed free trade deal with the President.
Freedom of speech is yet another issue where our own government takes a strikingly different view from Team Trump. Here, Starmer’s administration is pondering new crackdowns on social media content and a law against “Islamophobia”.
In the US, constitutional protections for freedom of expression are being bolstered on the ground by social media networks scrapping their opinion-monitoring bureaucracies.
So on border control, taxation, regulation, free expression, energy policy, military spending, defending sovereign territory, slimming-down government and abolishing political correctness, America is turning one way under Trump and set to take most of the free world with it, while we keep plodding leftwards under Starmer.
The biggest question for us is this: if Trump’s policies are seen to work, while Starmer’s continue to fail, what will happen next?