On Monday morning, the eve of the US midterm elections, the world braced for Americans’ judgment on Donald Trump’s retribution tour. That was the scorched earth campaign made possible, remember, by his war on “woke”.

It was that mandate that enabled him to pursue the untrammelled, ideologically-crazed, far-right Project 2025, while exporting his brand of “anti-woke” hatred, violent division and infantile vulgarity to susceptible groups across the world.

Trump’s followers regarded themselves as the victims, their muscularity shackled by squishy, low testosterone weaklings who were also, improbably, capable of locking them in “woke” superjails. Recall the touching words of the top banker quoted in the Financial Times after Trump’s 2024 election: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... it’s a new dawn”.

It was all that. The same people who accused the “woke” of “virtue-signalling” were sick of virtue itself. And Trump – who has portrayed himself as Jesus Christ – was their liberator.

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All these people happily pitched themselves under Maga’s........

© The Irish Times