“Is it true that you called her a fat pig?”
“No”, came the reply, “I called her a pig.”
“Come to think of it, Meredith,” he continued “is she fat?”
“Let’s get off the subject”, replied Meredith Vieira of The Today Show.
Donald Trump recounts the anecdote in his “Think Big and Kick Ass” book published in 2007.
It followed a controversy involving Rosie O’Donnell, sometimes described by some as a comedian.
She had verbally assaulted the Big Orange, on The View, the American version of our very own and equally unwatchable Loose Women.
The usual suspects were up in arms. “You can’t say that” they said.
A fever is spreading in America, and I hope Britain's leaders catch it soon — Alex Story
|Getty Images
“She attacks me and tells ugly lies about me, but I’m not allowed to attack back?” Trump asked.
Good at dishing it out, it seems, not good at receiving.
To do-gooders, victimhood is a shield, “offence taking” a spear.
Trump explains why he cares for neither, neutering much of the progressive cultural war machine in the process.
Chapter 5 of the book is entitled “Fear Factor”.
“Life is not easy”, he starts.
“The world is a vicious, brutal place”.
“It’s a place where people are looking to kill you” welding a Nietzschean and Hobbesian world view together to fashion his political cornerstone.
Chapter 6 is “Revenge”.
“I always get even”, he begins.
“Go for the jugular”, he tells his readers so "that people watching will not want to mess with you”.
When the book was published, Trump was in his early sixties, an age when many think of retirement.
As it turned out he was just getting started.
What armed him for what would follow was the experienced he gained in the crucible of New York’s notoriously ruthless real estate sector.
It gave him a deep well of experience from which to draw.
He was operating in the real world, not in an abstract one.
“I really know construction. I know the city”, he wrote.
But much of it wasn’t given. It was learnt and not pain free.
“I know every contractor in New York, and only about 25 per cent are any good. I know every one of them because I have been screwed by every one of them.”
He knew, in other words, a crook when he saw one. And he dealt with them, as he says, brutally.
Large scars, however, accumulated on his back, thickening his hide enough for him to withstand the deluge of lashes he was set to receive following his decision to run for the US Presidency in 2016.
His real-life experience, over decades, in the most real of all sectors, revealed to him that the Western world was run on academic lines, designed by ostensibly well-meaning academics and influence-seeking bureaucrats.
We are where we are because reality has been erased from our leaders’ mental make-up, replaced by empty, and it turns out, dangerous ideologies.
Trump saw economic theories, international diplomatic structures, and ideological platitudes for what they were: artificial constructs designed to hide self-interest, intellectual laziness and insufferable anti-national elitism behind a thin veneer of (lavishly tax-funded) altruism.
He makes it politely clear that “well-meaning but naïve” academics or experts “do not know what they are doing in tough real-life situations”, because they have never “faced tough winner-takes-all, fight-to-the-death negotiation against ruthless and vicious adversaries”.
Today, he would probably replace “well-meaning but naïve” with covetous and cowardly.
With great negotiators, he muses, against China, Iran or anybody else, a lot of America’s problems could be solved.
“We have all the cards: we have the strongest military and strongest economy on Earth, at least we had. Who the hell can beat us? We would be negotiating from strength.”
America’s problems are accumulating, he writes, because nothing gets done. That was in 2007.
What is true of America is triply so for Great Britain.
The wrong types of people, with no real-life experience, but armed with an invincible sense of undeserved entitlement, make decisions based on an illusory internationalist world order, untethered from the steadying anchor of patriotism.
He was already writing about solutions.
Implicit in his writings, these would of necessity have to by-pass established and carefully constructed but visibly failing frameworks.
There in black and white, in his “Think Big and Kick Ass” bestseller, Trump laid out his core principles.
They are simple.
Because he expects the world to be hostile, he is prepared to fight back.
And when he does, it will be with all guns blazing.
President Obama, evidently, hadn’t read the book.
In 2011, during the White House Correspondents’ dinner “Obama took advantage of Trump’s presence to mock him mercilessly”, reported Time Magazine.
The public humiliation was noted.
When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the old order panicked.
It mobilised all it had to destroy him, demolishing its credibility in the process.
It led with the Russia conspiracy, followed by cynically opening the borders to many millions of illegals and continued with politicised impeachment witch-hunts.
It all culminated in murder attempts.
Like the Hulk, Trump grew bigger, more invincible and more Orange, with each brick thrown at him. And he was on the receiving end of industrial-scale lapidation.
Inevitably, he won again in 2024, better prepared, more focused.
He is now getting even, aiming for the jugular as promised in “Think Big and Kick Ass”.
Indeed, the Department of Justice has taken possession of a criminal referral by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, outlining a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama to subvert Trump.
The press release from the office of National Intelligence, released in July 2025, states that “President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump”.
A coup? That’s treason.
Things are getting serious.
While this is being investigated, the House Oversight Committee has issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify regarding their possible connections to Epstein.
If we, in Britain, are bound to catch whatever fever the United States has, please let us catch this one.
Starmer and much of our bureaucrats need nothing less.