Donald Trump and Liz Truss have more in common than the first three letters of their surnames, or having their economic policies praised by Fox News. They used to belong to other parties.
You could even say they belonged to the opposite party of the one that they came to lead and through which they held the highest electoral office. Conversion and brand-switch. What better tools to make people believe?
Living in New York City in the 1980s, I witnessed the life and times of Donald Trump, a man who portrayed himself as the ultimate Manhattanite in a way that only someone born in the borough of Queens could.
In the Big Apple in the 1980s and 90s, Trump was THE example of the pinnacle of success. To Patrick Bateman in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, he is the GOAT of New Yorkers. Trump was so famous in New York that his 1992 divorce from his uber-ambitious first wife, and mother of his three eldest children, Ivana, became important news – in Iowa.
And in those days, even though he was registered as a Republican, Trump lived in reverse as a loud and proud Democrat, so much a supporter of the party of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bill Clinton that when he declared for the Republican nomination for president some years later, many thought he was some kind of saboteur.
The Republicans of the 80s and 90s were more staid, calmer. They did not party; they were not into flamboyance or the flaunting of high metropolitan style at its zenith.
But then things got stranger. For the Republicans with the Tea Party and for Trump with his weird obsession with Barack Obama and his birth certificate.
And then came the Escalator Moment. At Trump Tower, of course – a holy sight for Bateman – where Trump declared himself a candidate to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States. It was not he who discovered the Republican Party.
It was a new Republican Party, unaware of the depth of its newness, that discovered him.
Truss used to be a Liberal Democrat. Not just a member of the party, but an activist. She marched against Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s.
During her leadership campaign, she excited the Tory grassroots and the Tory press – maybe she was the Keeper of the Flame, the new Iron Lady they had been waiting for. The one to revive the presence of the Blessed Margaret, still beloved among Tory grassroots. She excited them and the Tory press with a self-belief and a total defiance of common sense that would keep the flame burning.
That Brexit house organ, the Daily Mail, limping away from the carcass of their boy Boris Johnson, lifted up their heads to see what must have looked like a new Boudicca.
Yes, she may have been a Lib Dem and a Remainer once, but she had seen the way, the truth and the light and been redeemed and resurrected into the gospel of hard Brexit.
What is often true about converts is true of Trump and Truss. Sometimes, they become zealots.
Take Paul of Tarsus, a pagan unbeliever. Boom! He becomes, in time, St Paul, the guy who railed at lapsing, lazy Christians.
Trump and Truss both went on their own roads to Damascus. Trump was led down his by Steve Bannon, who had spent years searching in the wilderness for a Messiah. Because although Fox News and talk radio hosts had created various sacred texts for the new radical right, what was needed was to sell it was someone who’d seen the light – not a Republican aristocrat like Jeb Bush. Aristos don’t have the fire!
Bannon saw his man and Trump saw the main chance. He, one of the all-time great American shills, created Make America Great Again, with its legions of red hats and other merchandise aplenty.
Truss was already stumbling down her Road to Damascus. Yes, she had backed Remain in 2016, but four years earlier she had been one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, a radical right-wing text that portrayed a UK that was at the mercy of feckless shirkers.
Once her brief attachment to Remain had gone as she switched her loyalties from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson, she was the ideal person who could remake Conservatism itself. Because she had come to it. Had seen the Light!
Rishi Sunak looked at Truss’s manifesto for the Tory leadership and told the members it would lead to economic disaster. They voted for it anyway.
GOP voters still overwhelmingly regard Trump as the Chosen One. Maybe Tory Party members will come to rediscover their affection for Truss now she is being replaced by Rishi Sunak.
Maybe they will look back with fondness on the way she moved from student days when she joined the cries for abolishing the monarchy to almost behaving like an absolute monarch: trashing her party’s election manifesto; smashing the platform on which Tories had won a near-landslide to make something new.
There is something special and reassuringly simple about the purity and the ruthlessness of the converted.
What that means for the rest of us is that politics has become narrower, more siloed. Tinier. Stupider. All the way around.
Our arguments become not efforts to appeal to reason, but point-scoring.
Trump and Truss tell us that purity is most prized – that label and demand of the zealot. And those who have gone to what my grandma used to call “The River Jordan and been washed clean”.
