Liz Truss’ attempt to crack America by hitching her wagon to the Trumpist juggernaut

A few weeks ago in our Media Trends newsletter we discussed Liz Truss’ attempt to crack America by hitching her wagon to the Trumpist juggernaut and concluded:

“…she has been assiduous in telling her new target audience exactly what they want to hear. In the braying arena of the American culture wars, any conscript willing to throw themselves unquestioningly onto the frontline will, at least initially, be accepted into the fold. The challenge for Liz is whether she can maintain this with enough zeal to capture the imagination of right-wing America longer term.”

This shameless pursuit of the reactionary populist zeitgeist, contradicting many of Truss’ long-held (albeit transient) ‘principles’, has gone global and, if the commercials –reported by the Times this week as totalling over £300,000 and rumoured to be even higher in the States- are to be believed, has been a significant success.

At the very least Truss is a symbol of how every zealous, assenting footsoldier in the febrile cauldron of the culture wars is a valuable asset. As a further bonus, Truss’ very status as a former Prime Minister, however roundly it’s lampooned in the UK, is itself enough to generate headlines, pull a crowd, and add a varnish of legitimacy to whatever viewpoint she’s espousing.

It might sound cynical, a little tawdry, or even Faustian, but this could also be watershed in how our high-profile ex-politicians conduct themselves after office. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were both arguably forerunners of this ‘culture warrior-for-hire’ approach but in ways so in-keeping with their respective personalities as to be unremarkable.

Truss, in selling her values down the river to cheerlead a Trumpian ideology ridiculed by many in her own country, is demonstrating to her fellow former public servants that fame, cash, respect, and adulation are plentiful for those who don’t care about their provenance.