Vance's lecture to Europe was gaslighting in its purest form

Trump’s technique, learned at the knee of vicious lawyer Roy Cohn, has always been to accuse his adversaries of whatever he himself is up to.

JD Vance in Munich (via (Leah Millis/ Alamy/ 2SR7M1X)

The term “gaslighting” is a piece of therapy-speak whose popularity as a buzzword peaked a year or so ago. We need to revive its use urgently so that we can better understand what some zealots in the Trump Administration are attempting in international politics.

Gaslight is a melodrama first staged in London in 1938, then adapted into a Hollywood movie in 1944, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer as the baddie, Ingrid Berman as the victim, and Joseph Cotton as the saviour.

“Gaslighting” is defined by psychologists as “manipulating” someone into questioning their own version of reality” - usually for the manipulator’s gain at the expense of their subject. In the play, a murderer and would-be thief tries to convince his wife that she is going mad so that she can be committed to an asylum leaving him in control of her wealth.

As a psychological ploy, gaslighting is the exact opposite of the classic gentle dumping: “It’s not you, It’s me”. A gaslighter insists that he is right, you are at fault and he wants to take control of you for your own good.

In his big speech at the Munich Security Conference, the new US vice president JD Vance tried to convince us in Europe that we are going self-destructively mad. “The threat I worry the most about is not Russia, it’s not China”, this concerned ally and former best-selling novelist opined, “what I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America”.

The steal, the three-card-trick, was blatant in the opening paragraphs. The Trump Administration claims to be the true defender of “values”, not the European nations which gave birth to the enlightenment and provided the founding fathers of the United States. There was not a hint that it may be America-First MAGA which is abandoning the idea of a brotherhood of man and woman.

Throughout his rise, Trump’s technique, learned at the knee of vicious lawyer Roy Cohn, has always been to accuse his adversaries of whatever he himself is up to – be it lying, corruption, threatening, bribing or subverting.

Thus, in representing a president who has just pardoned hundreds of rioters who stormed the US Capitol to overturn a democratic election, and who has punished agents of law enforcement who looked into possible Russian internet interference in his support, Vance berated Romania for cancelling an election based on what he calls “flimsy suspicions” of state-sponsored Russian interference. Followed up by a demand from the Trump Administration that Romania should give a passport to the misogyinistic online influencer Adam Tate and his brother, who are currently detained on charges of rape and fraud.

The Administration which stuffed the US Supreme Court to overturn America’s fifty-year-old federal right to abortion, and which won votes from the Christian right in return, now takes exception to the UK’s laws to allow women to approach clinics without being confronted.

Attempts to “shut down social media during times of civil unrests”, block “hateful content", or moves which “bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation” were billed by Vance as attacks on “free speech”. So chides the representative of a president who has banned Associated Press reporters for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America", and who has called at times for the closure of NBC, CBS and ABC.

In the Cold War, Vance says Europe and America were united against the bad guys that “censored dissidents, that closed churches”. Now his inference is that Europe has gone over to the other side – and not forgetting that the only “churches” which matter are Christian. “To many of us on the other side, it looks more and more like the old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet Era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion”.

Never mind Elon Musk shutting down a cartoonist of X who he didn’t like only this weekend, the foolish excesses of Wokeism – palely imported to Europe from America’s culture wars - are what Vance wants us to worry about.

This leads on to the big populist lie: that populist politicians already represent “the people”, the majority, and that to challenge or disagree with populist arguments is anti-democratic. As Vance sees it, “if you’re running in fear of your voters, there is nothing America can do for you.” European nations, he says, need “democratic mandates to achieve anything of value in the coming years”. Vance and Trump may not like them, but actually the European governments of what used to be the Western Alliance, all already have “democratic mandates”.

His patronising approach may have misfired already. Days before the German election, Musk and Vance’s explicit support for Alternative für Deutschland appears to dropped them out of second place in opinion polls.

According to Vance, “President Trump has made it abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent”. Good to know, we only live here. Why thane have he and his Russian friends excluded European nations, including the sovereign nation violated by Russia, from their Ukraine “peace talks”?

Successful gaslighting persuades the target that they are to blame. Undetermined and insecure, they convert tiny motes of real and alleged misjudgement into beams to be crushed under. Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight agreed she must be going mad as her husband manufactured evidence against her, all the while deceitfully expressing concern.

Vance’s argument has already seduced some in the UK, especially those who still believe in the special relationship with the US, whoever is president. Vance’s spurious attack on America’s traditional allies has been hailed by some commentators as “brutal honesty”. Senior politicians on the right are at an earlier stage, dazed and confused. Kemi Badenoch did not know which way to turn at this week’s ARC so avoided talking about the Ukraine war. In Reform UK’s MP grouping, Nigel Farage is more cautious about Trump’s approach than Richard Tice or Rupert Lowe.

It is true, and now widely agreed, that European nations need to spend much more on their own defence, as successive US presidents have told them. It is equally true that the post-war settlement has suited the US very well. The US expanded its political and economic interests, boosted by a demilitarised Germany and an indebted UK progressively surrendering its empire to US influence.

There is an active possibility that Trump could try to sell out Ukraine, splitting the spoils with Putin, as, obscenely, he demands half a trillion dollar’s worth of rare earth minerals from Zelensky as back rent for US aid given until now. Alternatively, the Deal Artist in Chief may come to realise that the best chance of sustained US prosperity relies on a genuine alliance with western democracies and western values.

The manipulative baddie in Gaslight is exposed in the end. The worst thing UK and its European friends could do is simper meekly to the vice president: "oh sorry, you must be right”.