Russell Jones's Week Moment: Don Trumpito's Like-Minded Dogs

As the US President launches economic sanctions against his own country, the barking hounds of the right are falling sheep-like into line, reports Russell Jones

Posters in Brick Lane in East London, on 2 April 2025, Donald Trump’s so called ‘Liberation Day’ . Credit: Stephen Chung / Alamy Live News

The disaster that gangster President Don Trumpito has just unleashed upon the global economy might not seem like an immediate cause for celebration, but pause for a moment to consider the positives: pending disasters have inspired some marvellous art. Or if not marvellous, at least copious. Have you seen the Netflix category dedicated to the apocalypse? It’s a veritable smorgasbord of calamity, ranging from Armageddon to Zombieland, and every extinction-level stop in between. Who cares that it’s a class of movies even less restrained by realism than the rest of Hollywood? Never mind the quality, feel the width. Turn off your brain and celebrate an artform where it’s easier to train salt-of-the-earth drill-operator Bruce Willis to be an astronaut than it is to train an astronaut how to use a Black and Decker.

Species-wide annihilation inspires great comedy too, for example the wonderful Gary Larson cartoon depicting the end of the world. Despite the collapsing buildings, screaming crowds, and mushroom clouds rising above a burning city, only one thing interests the dog in the back of a fleeing car: another dog staring at him from the other side of the road.

The caption reads: ‘And then Jake saw something that grabbed his attention’.

Something similar affects the right-wing ecosystem, a loose pack of snarling curs with zero interest in the world around them, or in messy authenticity, or the value of evidence, rational thought, or the constraints of reality. Like dogs barking at one another in a park, they’re only concerned with mutual identification, noisily drowning out adult conversation while they foul all over the place.

“Hey, you’re like me!” shouts one, and goes plop.

“Hey, so are you!” comes the straining reply, “Let’s bite something”.

They collate around the usual vendors of flailing grievance: Trump, Farage, The Daily Mail, Express, GB News, and the tattered remains of The Telegraph. They’re obsessed with free speech, with people “doing their own research”, with a limitlessly vague entity they’ve entitled “Western Values”, and with everybody behaving just like Jesus wanted us to: as greedy agents of high capitalism. Each nugget of disinformation emerging from one of their key figures transforms these barking dogs into a sheep-like daze, and they begin demanding the cancellation and silencing of anybody who displeases them.