Stop Trump: a very Millennial meltdown

It’s night. A blonde woman stands on Westminster Bridge, staring out across the water. In the background are the Houses of Parliament. We hear the bongs of Big Ben as the woman turns to face us. She speaks. ‘There’s a darkness coming. It’s already swallowed America, and now it’s coming for us, too.’

It could be a trailer for a BBC dystopian drama series. In fact, it’s a piece of political propaganda, timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s UK state visit last week. Zoe Gardner, the ubiquitous migration activist, narrates this two minutes of lurid fantasy. We see American soldiers marching, white British men with Union and St George’s flags. And we are warned that Trump is ‘spreading global fascism’. Welcoming him to Britain ‘drags us further into the abyss’, we’re told. There’s brief footage of Elon Musk doing his ‘Roman salute’.

There are also strange fantasies about what might happen to the UK in 2030. It’s all delivered with utmost earnestness, despite the laughable dialogue. We’re warned about a future in which ‘residents along the Thames woke this morning to find a giant banner draped across Tower Bridge’. The ‘banner’ consists of England flags emblazoned with the message, ‘Send them home’.

Then there’s a mock recruitment film for something called the ‘British Defence League’, which features a black-clad paramilitary talking about ‘purity’. Another campaigner plays a newsreader reporting that ‘Liverpool and Birmingham are in flames tonight as masked BDL officers detain hundreds’. All of this will come to pass, we are told, unless we protest against Trump.

It is, of course, deeply, cartoonishly silly. It channels the later Harry Potter films, with Trump as an American Voldemort and Elon Musk as Lucius Malfoy. There’s also an air of mid-2000s Doctor Who. A darkness powerful enough to ‘swallow’ America but which plucky Brits can resist is the stuff of a Russell T Davies script. The nods at fascism and roundups of dissenters recall the Doctor Who episode ‘Turn Left’, or Davies’s dystopian drama, Years and Years. In another echo of the 2000s, there’s even performative swearing, with Gardner declaring ‘fuck this’.

It is interesting that the most obvious cultural touchpoints for this film are 20 years old, and were of huge salience during the childhoods of middle-class, Millennial Brits. Even the language is childish. Reflecting on Trump’s last state visit to the UK, Gardner says, ‘In 2019 we protested against Donald Trump and we thought if we shout loud enough maybe he’ll go away’. No adult believes, or should believe, that this is how the world works. And yet the ‘Stop Trump’ campaign thinks this message will persuade its target audience.

Who might this advert ‘work’ on? Perhaps a very sheltered Millennial who grew up on Doctor Who and Harry Potter, and who speaks about the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony as though it were an Arcadian age. Their worldview is dully predictable. They’re somehow still angry about the Brexit vote. They blame misinformation for people voting ‘the wrong way’. And they understand the world primarily through fiction.

They’re also very obviously terrified of the English working classes. The video shows repeated images of Union and St George’s flags carried by white men seemingly in conflict with the police. This fear of English mobs is widespread. It even made it to the pages of The Times in July, with a Peter Schrank cartoon showing a giant English skinhead lurking beneath the ground, threatening to burst out.

Of course, middle-class fears of the mob are nothing new in England. In this, the panicked Stop Trump campaign recalls even earlier eras. Gardner’s equivalents during the 1926 General Strike or the 1830s Swing Riots would no doubt recognise the dangers posed to their interests by an awakening working class.

In the end, though, the Stop Trump campaign is in denial. It’s much easier and safer for them to blame Trump for political changes in Britain, than to accept that material realities mean that opposition to establishment rule, and in particular mass migration, has soared.

As the world becomes less and less like that of their childhoods, these Millennials’ moaning will only get more deranged.

David Shipley is a writer. Follow him on X: @shipleywrites.