Kathy Sheridan: Our politicians must assuage Trump’s tantrums. The public doesn’t have to play along

Protest is all we have left. That’s why people in their 60s and 70s who haven’t marched in decades will be out this weekend. Though slogans, songs and chants were always the rhythm of protests, maybe not this time. Nor will the usual bellowed speeches be necessary. The converted need no preachers. Just a record crowd in one place. And silence. A requiem for humanity. None of it should be necessary. It should have ended in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina on November 24th, 2015, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump mocked a man’s congenital disability to a cheering crowd. Serge Kovaleski’s remarkable courage in the face of his disability and his Pulitzer-winning journalism threatened their ignorance. Trump gave them permission to shout it out loud. That was the moment for all moral people in the US to unify and slam the brakes on his fledgling political career. Instead, it marked a different inflection point: the end of empathy. The right said empathy was “woke”. Gloria Steinem called it the most radical of human emotions. We can argue about overreach, but one thing is plain: when the ability to imagine another’s struggle is jeered and trampled, every single living creature looks like a hammer or a nail. When vengeance, gold and self-deification are the objectives of the world’s most powerful man, nothing and no one is safe or sacred. READ MOREEven the most bullheaded among us know that our politicians and diplomats must override their personal revulsion to guard Ireland’s economic interests. Sure, some on the welcoming committee have called Trump names like bully, misogynist, racist and vulgarian, but they were still more flattering than his future vice president was in 2016. Back then JD Vance called him “cultural heroin”, “idiot”, “noxious” and – in text messages to a former college roommate – said he was veering “back and forth between thinking that Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad ... Or America’s Hitler”. Nor has Trump’s ambassador to Ireland felt diplomatically constrained by his host country’s moral values. Edward Walsh chose US independence weekend to visit Conor McGregor’s Dublin pub, prompting former taoiseach Leo Varadkar to ask what messages he was sending out to victims of rape and sexual assault. Nothing about the drop-in was casual. It presumably would have entailed a site survey, route planning, Garda liaison, communications and press checks. McGregor had time to organise a red carpet. With similar deliberation last January, Walsh attended a Maga-style gathering including some populist right-wing activists and politicians whose views are anathema to the vast majority of his host population. It’s not reassuring to think that countries such as France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Malaysia – forced to accommodate brash, hectoring, often inexperienced, Trump-appointed diplomats – have had to contend with worse. Micheál Martin, in a third meeting with Trump in 18 months, can be relied upon to swerve the awkwardness. President Catherine Connolly will be appropriately frosty. But however pointed the dig or icy the tone, his mind will be elsewhere. This national exercise is entirely obscene: to assuage a US president’s toddler-like volatility en route to his playground. Just less than one quarter of his 590-plus days in office have been spent playing golf, according to trumpgolftrack.com.Those who despair in the US, I know, see nihilism, a loss of faith and self-sabotage among those who should be taking the unified fight to Trump. Yet, as well as his dismal polling, there are hopeful signs. Less than a year after the South Carolina rally, Milos Yiannopoulos, a far-right British-born Trump enthusiast, brought down the house at a Houston talk by telling a protester that this wasn’t the “silver-haired snowflake show”. “Madam, I’m grateful to you for coming, but to be quite honest with you, f**k your feelings,” he declared to hysterical cheers of “USA! USA! USA!”. There was never a clearer summation of the repulsively ignorant, abusive, entitled #FYF era. Except perhaps: “Your body, my choice, Forever”, posted by far-right podcaster and Trump fan, Nick Fuentes, on election night in 2024. He has since become a critic of Trump, but even a year ago, Yiannopoulos – now married to an American – was still posting Trumpian messages such as: “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”Last week, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), manacled hands and feet, shoved and shuffled from one jail to another, humiliated, degraded and left so frightened he was “weeping like an old woman”, as he put it to Piers Morgan – then deported back to the UK. And suddenly the #FYF troll is alive to what precisely is involved when “the machinery of American government lines up” to meet his own urgent targets. Now he regrets having been “a little bit blase, a little bit cavalier” towards other people in that position and pleads that his mundane working life be dissociated from his “silly” Twitter persona. It’s fascinating, of course, to see such admissions from people who’ve gained profitable notoriety firing social media bullets at a blob they never perceived as human. Yiannopoulos and others deserve all the Schadenfreude coming at them. But who gains?Controlling our borders does not equate with abandoning moral decency and empathy, even towards a hideous backtracking troll. The midterms are coming, and there is a shift in the air. That image of Trump, his limbs and face in mocking spasm, will serve as the weekend’s banner, as a reminder and a warning – if not to those in the US, then to ourselves.