# There’s no denying Trump’s true nature any more. But what will it take to stop another visit to the UK?

A  for a  was launched by the Stop Trump Coalition on Friday and had nearly 100,000 signatures by Monday. Meanwhile, another petition, , was nudging towards 150,000, while the Mail on Sunday was demanding exactly the same thing. Robert De Niro was pithier at the Oscars (), as he had been  in 2018, but finding allies in Hollywood has never been that difficult.

The Stop Trump Coalition has been around since his first term, protesting against his Muslim travel ban and the insult to feminism that they felt his ascent to high office represented. Back then, people on the left argued a lot about purpose and efficacy, while people on the right were busy doing whatever they were doing between 2016 and 2020. Oh yeah, they were trashing the UK’s trade relationships with the EU and then, when it all went wrong, blaming the remainers for not giving in fast enough.

There is a lot about our current situation that is familiar, in other words – that sense of trying to meet a mounting horror with tactics that caused quite a stir in the 17th century but seem to have lost some of their power since. Also, that feeling that it will always, in the face of a giant political foe, be more comfortable to pass the time squabbling about whether it’s better to confront him or trick him or ignore him. That way we can pretend that nothing has really changed: we’ve been arguing with each other for centuries.

But there’s also something unfamiliar about this moment: revulsion for Trump now spans everyone from what you could happily call the hard left, to what we may tactfully call … not the hard right but the deep right. Everyone has Trump’s number: from his meetings with the Russian president, he appears to have chosen the side of Putin; he cannot be appeased. The issue with petitions and demonstrations is not one of immediate efficacy any more. It’s that, when confronted with necropolitics, you rear away in disgust because you must, as you would if you saw a dead badger.

That said, there is a demonstration in support of  outside the US embassy in London on Wednesday. And the fact is that, the more people show up, the bigger the impact will be.

*   Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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