Y
ou may think fascism has come to America in the shape of a somewhat overweight 79-year-old man with curiously bouffant hair, a skin colour not found in nature and a fashion sense that reaches all the way from crotch-length ties to red baseball caps. But the newest menace, in the minds of some of our more imaginative doomsayers, is a 5 foot 3 inch, 27-year-old actress and model famous mainly for a cantilevered curvature and being clad in nothing but denim.
When Donald Trump blessed Sydney Sweeney this week in a Truth Social post it was, for the hyperventilating self-appointed guardians of America’s wilting democracy, a kind of dystopian marriage of two very different faces of the same evil plot to impose a white supremacist dictatorship on US politics and culture.
“Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “Go get ’em Sydney.”
The president was weighing into a national conversation that, if it were not so self-evidently absurd in premise, logic and application, could be described as the latest battle in America’s endless culture war. In fact, it is proving to be the last stand of the lunatics who have, in the past decade, seized control of public discourse in much of the English-speaking world, with their deranged obloquy against western civilisation and its supposed iniquities.
