It’s not just the deranged, nonce-adjacent narcissist in the White House. The oddballs are all over.

The obvious point is that it’s mad. Crazy. Bananas. The harder point is: how does he still have 80% approval ratings among Republicans? And the harder point still: how did it all get so mad?

First, turning away from carnage is natural, like putting a bill you can’t pay in the drawer and pretending it doesn’t exist. Second, here at least, we feel powerless. We are takers not market-makers in the great global game. Third, the firehose of outrage is part of the strategy. No one can remember Monday’s corruption scandal, after Tuesday’s blasphemy, Wednesday’s bigotry and Thursday’s threat. Fourth, the dirty trick of autocracy is the calculus: standing up to bullies is costly. But go along with the corruption and you might get enough loyalty points for a kitchen appliance. It won’t be 6 cents off your petrol though.
Ask Saudi or the UAE. They placed big bets on Trump, gave him a plane, bribed his family, and now they’re getting bombed.

But the fifth reason is the most painful of all: Hungary shows you can fight back. The world hasn’t. It has tried to live with the crazy instead of making a red-blooded defence of the good.

So really, how does the crazy happen? It happens because countries did exactly what Labour is doing here. You become so pickled in careful, so bloodless, stuck in dogma irrelevant to real needs, that people who want something different and better have nowhere to turn.

It happened in the UK, which is how they got the Brexit disaster that is tearing the country apart a decade on. It’s how Starmer’s Labour went from a landslide to fourth and the people have turned to the crazy Trump-loving Reform. It happened in Europe, where social democratic parties are going out of existence.

You don’t beat crazy by being even more crazy, but you also don’t beat it by being bland like a bread roll, hoping to drift into office. Keep doing that, and don’t be surprised if the crazy comes calling.

Josie's Post column