Trump is driving political debate to ever new lows. The left must hold on to its values | Zoe Williams

The problem with Trump’s America is that everything happens so fast, and across too many categories. There are moves so stupid and trivial that you can lose hours wondering whether there is a long game or if it’s all just trolling: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, bringing back plastic straws. There are moves so inhumane, causing so much deliberate suffering, that they are hard to fathom. The cancellation of USAid is so consequential that reaction has almost frozen in place, as the world figures out which immediate humanitarian crisis to prioritise, and waits for some grownup, such as the constitution, to step in. Into that baited silence steps Elon Musk, with a hoax about the agency having been a leftwing money-laundering organisation. Then everyone hares off to react to that, first debunking, then considering, what it might mean, for a man of such wealth and power to have come so completely unstuck from demonstrable reality. This is not an accident – and yet it has no meaning. So why is he doing it? To galvanise a base, or make a public service announcement that observable reality can’t help you now, so get used to having it overwritten by fantasy? It’s an understandable thing to worry about.

Then there are the chilling direct legislative moves against sections of US society: banning the use of any pronouns that are not male or female in government agencies, defunding gender-affirming medical care, signalling a ban on transgender people in the military with an executive order that says being trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life”. There’s the assault on immigrant rights, which is vivid and wide-ranging from the resurrection of Guantánamo Bay as a for ever holding-house, to the shackled people deported to Punjab, to the reversal of a convention that schools, churches and hospitals would not be raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The sabre-rattling on tariffs throws up its own unstable side-show. Bit-part Republicans such as Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator, try to carve out some space in the drama with remarks so bracingly racist – the maternal death rate isn’t as bad if you don’t count black women, apparently – that you’re forced to give him the attention he craves. Ignoring him will not make him go away.

There will never be any shortage of things to react to; nothing will ever be inconsequential. Even things that misfire comically or are immediately ruled illegal will have an effect, drive the debate to new lows and foster fear and division. And there will rarely, from outside the US, be any meaningful way to react; whatever ideas about democracy we’ve had to let go of in 2025, it remains bordered.

There’s an agenda to that too, of course. If the watching world is constantly responding to things it can’t change or even protest about, that sends spores of impotence far and wide. Events in the US are already debasing our own discourse: Trump cheerleaders springing up with bizarre arguments and the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch strategically claiming that liberalism has been “hacked” by groups focused on “radical green absolutism”. The effect? Everything is pushed rightwards.

It might be impossible to blot out the drama, but we have to simultaneously focus on our own debates and our own terms – the threats to trans rights in our own country, the language on immigration in our own parliament, our own burgeoning politics of nastiness and tough-talking. We don’t have to surrender to the momentum of the right by becoming more like them. We don’t have to catch this virus because America sneezed.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist