“I was a big fan, but now I’m convinced – TRUMP IS TOAST,” ran a massive puff across the top of the Daily Mail last week as sometime star columnist and gorblimey merchant Richard Littlejohn finally conceded the man in the White House might not be the Messiah he once thought.
Inside, Littlejohn, who spends much of his year in Florida, reports from the frontline of, er, his local bar and finds that many of those necking Coors inside are wearying of the antics of the leader of the free world.
There was “a gentle buzz, a nervous rumble round the bar”, reports Littlejohn. “Even though this is ostensibly, albeit sophisticated, MAGA country, you pick up a sense of unease. Has The Donald lost it? Is he going into Crazy Joe Biden mode?
“Never mind the bizarre AI video with the tiger, or that gormless Lady Godiva lookalike who lasted about five minutes as this week’s latest White House press secretary. There’s a growing body of opinion that Trump is, well, getting on a bit, entering a marbles-free zone.”
There is evidence everywhere. A woman in a discount warehouse where Littlejohn is shopping complains that steak is getting expensive. His friend Roger – “who thinks I’m a dangerous liberal” – is stocking up on ammunition in the fear a Democrat takes the governorship. Littlejohn’s sister knows some finance types in Detroit who’ve gone off Trump.
Littlejohn was always a backer of Trump. “He’s an Anglo/Jockophile, who was all in favour of Brexit,” he explains. “My old mate Nigel Farage, who campaigned for Trump, assured me he wasn’t as bonkers in private as he seemed to be in public.”
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But… “That was before Iran, the Tony The Tiger meme, the attempted annexing of Greenland and renaming Lake Ontario the Lake of America. Nurse!”
Wait… what? Because not only was Littlejohn fully in support of Trump taking over Greenland – he backed it to the extent that he literally called on the president to buy Britain too!
In an August 2019 column unambiguously headlined “Forget Greenland, why doesn’t Donald Trump buy Great Britain?”, Littlejohn wrote that the US taking the territory “makes sense”. “Greenland is geographically part of the North American continent, situated strategically between the Atlantic and the Arctic,” he wrote. “There’s already a significant U.S. military presence, part of a global network of early warning systems.”
Alas, though, the Greenlanders did not much fancy becoming part of the American Empire. So Littlejohn had a much better idea.
“May I, then, suggest that he sets his sights much, much higher and makes a bid for Britain instead?” he wrote. “Why not? With the pound plummeting towards parity with the dollar, Britain has never been better value.
“We wouldn’t be 51st State in terms of influence. We would immediately become the largest, by population, ahead of California. U.S. states have far more independence from Washington than EU members have from Brussels and Strasbourg… So come on down, Donald. Make us a deal and make it straight.”
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Lest anyway thought it a one-off musing, Littlejohn returned to it in January 2026, as he compared Trump favourably to then UK PM Keir Starmer. “Trump should raise his sights from Greenland and buy Britain instead,” he wrote. “I’d take him, warts and all, over our hopeless, complete and utter lawyer of a PM any day.”
Nurse! Perhaps it’s no wonder even Daily Mail bosses appear to be tiring of Littlejohn’s well-worn schtick, recently cutting his output from two columns a week to one.
Meanwhile, over in the Spectator, the scales appear to have fallen from the eyes of another commentator normally relied on to talk up Trump. Julie Burchill, under the headline “Shame on me for being fooled by Donald Trump”, wrote how she too had realised he may not have been the great statesman she so admired.
“I should have drawn the line at the persistent sex-pest allegations, the ludicrous call for a ‘united Ireland’ and, more than anything, his repeated disrespect towards President Zelensky,” conceded the one-time hip young gunslinger.
“I’m ashamed that it took me so long to see sense; I swallowed that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ cliche to a point where I couldn’t seem to see past it. Like a long relationship you’ve invested a lot in, I’d defended him to my incredulous friends for so long that to back down would make me look like an atrocious judge of character – which I am, and always have been, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.”
Well, quite. Still, the cult of Trump may be finally coming to end – one deluded commentator at a time.
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