Donald Trump is here to draw a Linehan in the sand

Next week, Donald Trump will become the first US president to make a second state visit to Britain. If the vulgar American puts a foot wrong in the social minefield of Windsor Castle or verbally swats Sir Keir Starmer at a press conference, his faux pax will set off a frenzy of contempt.

But the real misstep has already been made, and not by the Americans. The suppression of free speech in the UK is not just an insult to the British people; in Washington, it’s seen as a threat to the national security of the United States.

The arrest of Graham Linehan, an Irish citizen, for jokes made from his home in America on X, an American-owned website, was worse than stupid. It was a serious blunder. It confirms the view, now unanimous on the American right, that Britain is an accelerated case study in the willed decline of the West.

• Graham Linehan’s posts about trans activist were ‘vindictive’, court hears

Its kamikaze ruling class is on a Spenglerian suicide mission. It’s so intent on self-destruction, it doesn’t see that key American interests will be collateral damage — and that the Trump administration cannot afford to accept it.

I was in Washington last week for the National Conservatism conference (NatCon). No one wanted to know about Angela Rayner’s property purchases. No one cared about Starmer’s imminent reshuffle of deckchairs on the Titanic. The American right wants to know why the British police are arresting foreign citizens and why the British government is threatening American tech companies. Several US officials told me the Trump administration sees free speech in Britain as a national security interest.

The Labour government, they say, is so focused on trade relations it doesn’t get the big picture. The Brits know free speech matters to Americans, but they just don’t get why. They think it’s just historical and cultural.

But free speech is more than that. Britain’s soft-power self-harm, through its non-crime hate incidents and the Online Safety Act, is now so advanced that the national brand may be wrecked for a generation. It’s only the hard stuff of strategic interest that’s going to halt the suppression of free speech in Britain.

The internet was the most successful American export of globalisation, but its power and potential were never equally distributed. Autocrats saw that Silicon Valley wasn’t just hyping its stock when it promised the new tech would change the deep structures of government.

The American internet was digital Coke, the real thing. But most users got the local rip-off: the sour taste of the Chinese internet, the Russian internet, the Iranian internet — and now the internet of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which presumes, in European tradition, that speech is in the gift of the governors, not the governed.

British users fell inside the American sphere by happy accident, and with it got a taste of American freedom. They speak American on the internet. They are starting to act American in the streets. They know what their government is trying to take away from them.

Digital communications are the lifeblood of our economic exchanges and social lives. The success or failure of nations, alliances and ideas like “the West” now depends on remounting the elements of national interest — industrial policies, trade policies, defence strategy — on the new technology.

The Trump administration gets all this because the American right is the internet’s natural partner. The Democrats had a gerontocratic lock on the old institutions, so the uncredentialed young adopted the internet. While the right learnt to meme, the core American value of patriotic libertarianism completed its post-Reagan migration from left to right. I saw the outcome last week at NatCon. Self-made intellectuals and internet controversialists mingled with Maga heavyweights such as Tulsi Gabbard and deep thinkers like the neo-Kissingerian strategist Elbridge Colby.

Laugh at Donald Trump all you like. Snobbery is the consolation prize for failure. Trump will be gone soon but the new Americans are serious. They intend to win and they are planning for the long haul. The Department of Defense is once more on the front foot as the Department of War. The frontier of the American empire is hardening as an economic, military and digital frontier. America expects Britain to do its duty and remain inside it.

Britain’s rulers, Conservative or Labour, elected or not, prefer to drift into the net of the EU’s Digital Services Act or contrive some custom-built compromise that is beyond their competence and will never convince the Americans anyway. They have created a conflict of interest with their closest ally. The Americans cannot afford to lose Britain. That means they must pressure Britain into line, not just with Trump’s open disapproval at a press conference but by withholding intelligence or slow-walking economic preference.

In Washington, I also saw Nigel Farage acclaimed as the “next prime minister of Great Britain” at the launch party for GB News America. The speakers included Trump’s trade envoy, Steve Witkoff, one of several attending cabinet ministers — Farage claimed 11.

On Friday, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote that Britain was becoming a “failed state”. Trump thinks the same, and Wall Street’s confidence is always conditional. Even if propriety obliges Trump not to speak too freely while on British soil next week, Starmer would be wrong to think Britain has got away with anything.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a Washington Examiner columnist