Emergency Debate: Should the Right Dump Trump
A brutal framemogging awaits my opponents
It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in a proper debate. I think the last time must have been in Oxford, during my DPhil (2015-2018). I ended up being the president of a drinking-and-discussion society named the D’Avenant Society, after a syphilitic poet (William D’Avenant) who attended my college briefly in the seventeenth century and went on to become poet laureate during the Restoration. Floreant manes D’Avenantis! as we used to proclaim by candlelight every other Wednesday of term.
Anyway, I’ve had to brush up on my chops, and sharpish, to take part in an emergency debate at the Unherd club in London tonight. I’ve been paired with Lord Toby Young to oppose the motion, “This house believes the right should dump Donald Trump.”
My argument is going to consist of a devastating framemogging, followed by liberal amounts of jestergooning, in the hope of spiking my opponents’ cortisol and amusing and winning over the audience, who I believe will cast the deciding vote at the end of the contest.
Perhaps not. While I fully expect to mogg my opponents, I will be making a detailed argument about the necessity of Donald Trump, to the end that questions like, “Should the right dump him?’ are simply redundant. Trumpism is here to stay, whether the right—and I suspect neither of my opponents actually are on the real right—likes it or not. Trump has ripped up the rulebook, overturned the international order, and provided a model for popular right-wing success after decades of pounding sand and an endless succession of complete losers like Mitt Romney and John McCain.
I’m not entirely sure we’ll win, given that the room is likely to be full of people who loathe Trump for one reason or another, but I’m going to give it my best shot.
The format will be: three-minute introductory remarks by each member of the panel; a thirty-minute debate; then open questions from the audidence.
Here are my introductory remarks. You can watch the debate live here from 7pm London time and I’m sure it will be available to watch again afterwards.
Good evening.
If the philosopher GWF Hegel were alive today, what would he call Donald Trump?
