During her trip to America, Liz Truss was happy to be cheered by some Republicans who want Trussonomics-style uber-neo-liberalism.
H ats off to Politico, which has a killer piece from Washington, D.C., about Liz Truss’s trip to America’s capital last month. It seems that the woman who lost the longevity battle to a lettuce (and practically crashed the pound, meanwhile) believes the comeback trail lies through the Beltway.
Perhaps Truss has forgotten the scorn her disastrous premiership drew from the Biden administration. Perhaps she was happy to be (kinda) cheered on her way by Republicans, some of whom want Trussonomics-style uber-neo-liberalism. It’s really a sort of arson attack on government takings, and its logic is as follows: by making it difficult to collect revenue for the functions of government, government ceases to function.
Politico’s Alexander Burns spoke to Republicans who met Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. In Mr Burns’ words, Liz Truss seemed to still be “determined to rouse Britain from economic stagnation — and intimated that she did not trust her successor, Rishi Sunak, a more technocratic Tory, to do the job.”
As tone-deaf as ever, she seems to have quaffed some of the pitying words (and near-insults directed at Britain in DC) as if they were the very finest mead. For instance, Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, who chairs the influential Republican Study Committee. Truss had a long chat with Hern, perhaps because both of them fervently believe their respective countries are on the wrong track.
The Congressman said Truss was “prime minister of what once was a great nation” and that she had tried to “save Great Britain” before she was foiled by trying to do “too much, too soon.” Geez. For an encomium, that’s pretty snarky.
Along with a lack of self-awareness, Liz Truss appears to be an American groupie through and through. Never mind that the US political system is increasingly considered flawed and badly in need of a fix, Truss remains a true believer. Apparently, a congressional aide heard her say Britain’s Conservatives could “disappear entirely” as a political force because voters in the UK had the bad habit of cancelling parties in a way that doesn’t happen in the US.
Many would say there are members of America’s Republican Party who entirely deserve to be politically run out of town, but then no one ever suggested good judgement was a strong point for Liz Truss.
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— AUTHOR —
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▫ Rashmee Roshan Lall, Journalist by trade & inclination. World affairs columnist. |
Sources
▪ Text: This piece was originally published in Medium and re-published in PMP Magazine on 2 February 2023, with the author’s consent. | The author writes in a personal capacity.
▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. - Former PM Liz Truss visiting the Empire State Building while attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York. | 20 September 2022. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)
