London is clearly mulling what to do now that Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election. Financial Times Associate Editor and “chief U.S. commentator” Edward Luce offered no suggestions on that score in his post-election opinion today, but he bitterly recognized that the starting point for any new strategy will have to be the recognition that “America Wants Trump—No Ifs or Buts.”
Luce acknowledged that “Trump is legitimately the next President of the United States,” making any attempt to rerun the Russiagate gambit more difficult. “Much as with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, there are many fingerprints on Harris’s defeat. But it will be far harder this time to blame foreign bad actors. Russia’s Vladimir Putin will doubtless see huge advantages to Trump’s re-election…. Yet it was Americans who put Trump back in office without obvious help,” he wrote.
His assertions about why Americans voted for “a convicted felon, who is also indicted for attempting to overthrow the last election and is an overt admirer of autocrats,” are as ridiculous as that absurd description of Trump.
What worries him, however, is “what is coming next,” because “Trump has vowed retribution and he means it.”
His concluding paragraph: “America has turned a decisive corner. It would be foolhardy to suppose that Trump did not mean what he said when he vowed to come after his enemies. It would also be delusional to think that he will in any way feel constrained by his country’s 50-50 split. Trump has a mandate to overhaul the U.S. in unimaginably disruptive ways. There will be no going back from the seismic outcome of America’s 2024 election.”
At the start of Trump’s first term in office, Luce had forecast the permanent bureaucracy (which he called “the so-called deep state") could bring Trump down. In a February 20, 2017 column, Luce, then the City of London financial daily’s Washington correspondent, fulminated that Trump had “declared war on the intelligence agencies and the media. … Either the forces that are against the President will bring him down, or he will destroy the system. My bet is on the first,” he wrote.