One dinner party guest predicted Trump would be ‘hell-bent’ on taking revenge on anyone who had challenged him.
At a dinner party on the American east coast last week with guests from finance, tech, academia and a former senator, one of my neighbours whispered across the table: “Do you think we are living in Leopoldstadt?”
For those who have not seen Tom Stoppard’s multi-award-winning play of that name, it centres on a Viennese Jewish family who initially dismiss the threats of the Nazis as fantastical but later pay a terrible price.
This might not seem relevant to America in 2023, and my dining companion did not make the comparison specifically because of rising anti-Semitism.
Her fear is that America’s establishment may currently be sleepwalking towards a different threat that they would prefer to dismiss as far-fetched, this time in relation to former president Donald Trump.
Polls suggest that Trump is easily the most popular candidate among Republican-leaning voters; a CNN poll last month suggested that 47 per cent back him as a presidential nominee.
The clear implication is that he would almost certainly win the presidential nomination if the vote was held today, and he was up against several challengers (as is currently the case).
Indeed, almost everyone at this dinner party assumed that the 2024 vote would be a choice between Trump and the current president Joe Biden. Other gatherings I have attended echo this.
Read the article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Review.