Rebecca McQuillan: The politics of American right is getting nastier. Is it catching on here?

Donald Trump has been astonishingly successful in getting Republican voters to believe what Biden has called the Big Lie, that the Democrats stole the 2020 election through massive election fraud. Attempts by exasperated judges, officials and Democrats to highlight the lack of any evidence whatsoever to support the claim, in spite of repeated exhaustive public investigations, have had next to no impact.

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Such is the modern-day Republican movement. Belief in the power of objective truth seems hopelessly quaint in the face of this juggernaut of anger.

Trump has total command of the Grand Old Party. In key battleground states, Republican voters have been choosing candidates for November to stand for the roles of governor, attorney-general and secretary of state, offices which have authority in elections. Republicans are opting again and again for election deniers – in Arizona, all three Republican candidates fall into that category.

Democrats believe these candidates will be easier to beat because of their extreme views, but nothing is certain. The threat these individuals pose to democracy is blatant and all of a piece with Mr Trump’s claims to be the victim of “political persecution” and his supporters’ demands to defund the FBI.

And it’s getting nastier all the time. The language key Trump supporters use of their perceived opponents strays beyond the normal cut-and-thrust into something more sinister. Immigrants are now routinely termed “invaders”. One true zealot, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake calls journalists “corrupt” and “unAmerican” (in spite of having spent most of her career as a TV news anchor) and her Twitter account called another Republican candidate “sickening” for not agreeing that the 2020 election was “stolen”.

Republicans who won’t toe the Trump line face loathing. One chilling example comes from would-be Republican senatorial nominee in Missouri, Eric Greitens. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says in a June campaign advert – RINO standing for “Republican in name only”. In the ad, Greitens totes a shotgun and is shown with a group of men in military gear bursting into a home.

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The ad has been met with a wave of condemnation, including from Missouri’s largest police union, which said it sent the “dangerous message” that it was “acceptable to kill those who have differing political beliefs”. It’s been banned by Facebook, but Greitens seems unfazed. Earlier this month, Donald Trump said he endorsed “Eric” in the Missouri Republican primary. There are two Erics in the contest, but the former president’s willingness to be perceived as a possible Greitens supporter speaks volumes.

Trump critics like Liz Cheney, meanwhile, are not making it through the Republican primaries.

All this matters enormously on this side of The Pond, most obviously because big wins for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) ticket in November make a Trump victory in 2024 more likely, with all the implications that has for climate change, Nato and the threat posed by Russia.

But it also matters because the tenor of American politics is catching. Cartoonish as Trump’s puppets may seem when set against the more muted palette of British politics, there’s nothing funny about their intentions and we can be sure politicians here will be influenced by them.

We’re seeing it already. This week, the Democrats have chosen a candidate to go up against keenly watched Republican Ron de Santis in Florida. De Santis, a diehard of the right, sets MAGA hearts aflutter and is tipped to run for the 2024 presidential nomination.

Anti-mask and anti-abortion, he loves to bash the “woke”. A brief perusal of his latest tweets finds him attacking ESG (environmental, social and governance criteria followed by businesses) and “woke ideology”, and promoting new measures to prevent “ballot harvesting”.

The echoes of all this in our own political debate are unmissable. Election fraud is vanishingly rare in the UK, but the Conservatives stand accused of overstating the fraud risk in order to pass laws insisting on certain types of voter identification – a move which, surely coincidentally, looks set to benefit their party. The Tory leadership campaign has seen both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak reference their anti-woke credentials, making sure to use the word itself in case anyone misses the dog whistle.

Truss’s attack on “woke civil service culture” is pure populism, repackaging public servants as establishment elites, casting Truss as the true champion of the people.

Meanwhile, she has announced a moratorium on green levies, the target of hard right Brexit types like Steve Baker. She appears to be staking out her position in the culture wars.

We also hear from both Tory candidates a slavish adherence to the fiction that Brexit has been a roaring success, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Just as calling out the Big Lie will result in swift and public excommunication from Mar-a-Lago, denying the glory of Brexit is forbidden in the Tory party.

Liz Truss deserves some credit – she is no clone of Trump and our democracy would be safer in her hands than America’s in his. But just as Trump has changed the Republicans for the foreseeable future, so the politics of the Johnson era, itself influenced by the US debate, looks to have become a fixture here. The worry must be that this style of politics, which ignores unhelpful evidence and stokes division, is a gateway drug for the hard stuff Donald Trump peddles.

Half of Republican voters want Trump to run in 2024. Perhaps Liz Cheney will run for president and hive off just enough Republican voters to make it hard for him to win.

We’ll see, but whatever happens, we have a serious problem of our own to contend with.