Trump evokes Bond villain as he waxes lyrical in movie-length speech

Former US president Donald Trump is continuing his reactionary nostalgia tour, giving a mammoth 84-minute address to about 250 of the Republican Party’s biggest donors at the Four Seasons in New Orleans over the weekend. But like every consummate entertainer, he didn’t just play the hits: he found new places to take his act.

First, the classics. The 2020 election was “stolen” and the Republican Party has to be “tougher” on electoral fraud. There was climate change denial (“a great hoax”). The barely veiled admiration for tyrants: North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is “seriously tough” and Trump was jealous of the way his aides “cowered” in his presence. It got a laugh. Insults scattered like a shotgun blast at every perceived slight and betrayal, like “stupid, corrupt Mitch McConnell”.

And, of course, the fact that none of this would have happened if Trump were still in charge: “I knew Putin very well. He would not have done it. He would have never done it.” The phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that initiated his impeachment — in which he appeared to threaten to withhold aid until Ukrainian authorities investigated his political opponents — didn’t get a mention.

But he also came up with some new material. Most striking was the suggestion the US should put Chinese flags on its F-22s, “bomb the shit out of Russia … and then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch”. Apart from sounding a bit war-crimey, you may recognise “bring about a major conflict by framing one world power for an attack on another” as a big element of at least three Bond villains’ world-domination plots.