With Trump as America's tsar and Musk at his side, Starmer must now look to Europe | Jonathan Freedland

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : It's a playbook written by Vladimir Putin, with Trump as America's tsar and Musk as his principal broligarch.
51% : Trump knows that Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a US ally.
49% : But for now, the EU is the only serious democratic counterweight to the Trump-Musk axis.
48% : As Bannon rightly remarked of Musk this week: "Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics - and he can deploy both at unprecedented scale."And just as Putin understood early that dictators flourish when citizens stumble in a fog of disinformation, and that there can be no accountability if the media are either crushed or discredited, so Trump once admitted to a reporter that he attacks journalists very deliberately, "so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you".
47% : On Monday the X owner, who sits at Trump's right hand, leading his new, if not formally constituted, department of government efficiency, polled his 212m followers on whether "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government."
47% : Pause for a moment to note how the same Brexiters who once insisted EU refrigeration standards for exported kippers, which turned out not to exist, were an intolerable violation of British sovereignty are now untroubled by a foreign oligarch openly engaged in overturning a British election - indeed, how eagerly the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have hitched a ride on Musk's bandwagon.
43% : While the Russian dictator covets Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, Trump is eyeing up Greenland and the Panama Canal (and even Canada).
43% : Now the non-US west has to achieve a similar clarity and unity in the face of Trump and his own brand of authoritarianism, currently buttressed by the sugar-daddy of the global far right, Musk.
42% : The torrent of lies, aimed at widening ethnic divisions and inflaming nativist nationalism.
41% : He dispatched his son Don Jr to the island on Tuesday, as Trump explained that the US needed Greenland for its own security.
32% : Plenty thought Trump was kidding when he talked about acquiring Greenland, but not many are laughing now.
30% : Trump continues to live by that rule, making it hard to keep up with everything he and his circle do and say - and he's not even back in office yet.
30% : "We can't be too happy with Denmark," Trump said, not long before a New York court on Friday prepared to confirm his status as a convicted felon, "and maybe things have to happen with respect to Denmark having to do with tariffs."
28% : So advised Steve Bannon, onetime chief strategist for Donald Trump, who understood long ago that if you want to get away with an outrageous act, follow it with another and then another.
28% : Those deluding themselves that Trump will respect the supposed special relationship between the US and UK need to absorb the fact that while Musk has been aiming his fire at London, Trump has raised not a murmur of protest.
19% : Trump is acting instead like an enemy of the US's historic partners, either threatening their security and sovereignty directly or indulging hostile interference in their domestic affairs.

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