Elon Musk is a monster bully on the loose, but he can only get his way if we let him | Martin Kettle

They can smell the fear. And they are thrilled by what they can smell. Fanned by a mesmerised media at home and abroad, the thrill excites them into fresh provocations. Donald Trump knows the US’s allies’ nerves are jangling as his second presidency approaches – and he wants to keep it that way. Elon Musk is similarly glorying in his power to provoke and misinform without suffering penalty or reprimand – least of all from most of Britain’s politicians and press.

Both men are bullies. And this is what bullies do. However, there is no disputing that this is also their moment. The Trump inauguration on 20 January will be an in-your-face celebration of America First power. It will also be a requiem that consigns large parts of the rules-based postwar global settlement to the grave.

Welcome to the world of the next four years – and maybe more. Except that, if one thing can be said with confidence about the Trump second term, it is that at some stage he will surely turn against Musk, probably in a dispute over the scale of government spending cuts. In the end, there will only be room for one egomaniac at the controls.

But there is also something distinctly performative about the taunts that Trump and Musk have been firing off against the continuing supporters of the liberal democratic order in these past few weeks. This performative habit is not new. Trump, after all, discovered in his first term that promising a wall on the border with Mexico did not mean he actually had to finish building one. The threat, and what it stood for, proved more than enough in domestic political terms. It may be the same this time around.

This is not to deny that on some important level Trump and Musk believe the things they are saying, or to pretend that there is no coherence to their actions. Trump, in particular, has always believed in the value of menace and surprise as levers in the transactional politics that are his nature. Musk is cruder and more apocalyptic. He loathes every restraint on his desire for a human race remade in his own overriding self-interest.

Yet that does not mean that these things will happen, let alone that they are unstoppable. Does Trump, for instance, really intend to try to subjugate Canada, forcing it into an Anschluss so that he can ride in triumph through Ottawa? Does he actually have a plan to annex Greenland, in defiance of international law, transatlantic agreement and, not least, military logic? Donald Trump Jr’s photo-op day trip there this week is not proof of seriousness in that regard.

It is easy for liberals, in the US and abroad, to be outraged by such goading and hostility. This is of course why the conservatives do it. Nevertheless, liberals in the US and elsewhere should not allow themselves to be blinded to the existing political system’s capacity for a certain level of oppositional holdout. This is not Nazi Germany. Even among US Republicans on Capitol Hill there are important divisions. In Congress, all politics is still local, and few members’ interests are exactly the same.

The name of the game for liberals in 2025 and beyond is therefore survival. It will not be easy, and anyone who pretends otherwise is a false friend. Nevertheless, we forget at our peril that politics is a subtle, complicated business of peaceful trade-offs and balances, not just a zero-sum public slugfest of the kind we are witnessing right now. Even under absolute monarchy, a skilled operator such as the Thomas Cromwell depicted in Hilary Mantel’s novels could survive for years, and do remarkable things, before the light went out. Today, in what is still a democratic age, not an absolutist one, a bullying ruler’s opponents possess more varied weapons of resistance and restraint and their prospects of survival are much greater, in every sense.

This is particularly true internationally. This is why the task of handling the Trump restoration is such a difficult and fascinating, as well as highly unwelcome, challenge for all of the US’s traditional allies. It is certainly not pretty, but it is equally certainly the challenge facing Keir Starmer and his new ambassador in Washington, Peter Mandelson. It faces France, Germany, Ireland, Poland and every other European democracy, too. The key question facing them all is how to work within and with the US system – not simply with Trump or Musk themselves – to constrain the administration. Some are handling it better than others, even at this early stage.

Justin Trudeau announced his plans to step down as Canada’s prime minister this week, for mainly domestic reasons. But his party also had doubts about Trudeau’s ability to handle a second, more aggressive Trump administration, triggering the departure of finance minister Chrystia Freeland (who may be Trudeau’s successor as Liberal leader). In her resignation letter, Freeland called for a pushback against Trump’s tariff threats and the avoidance of “costly political gimmicks”. The Liberals may lose to the Conservatives in this year’s general election, but no Canadian government of whatever stripe could survive if it allows itself to be bullied by Trump.

No European country is as intimately close to the US as Canada or Mexico. Yet Trudeau’s fall has lessons for them all, even so. Like Canada, each western democracy must navigate a path between becoming Trump’s poodle and becoming his next tariff-war enemy. This is especially challenging in straitened economic times, in time of war, and when the reputation of effective government is so weak – all of which apply in 2025. In Europe, a continent characterised by weak coalition governments, many could fail.

All politics and governance currently faces a period of lurching change. Nothing is to be gained by wishing it otherwise. Yet this is not a wholly unprecedented situation. A much earlier democratic era had to contend not only with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, who took Europe to war, but also with domestic megalomaniacs such as William Randolph Hearst or, in the UK, Lord Northcliffe; media barons whose cravings for power were as insatiable as their indifference to accuracy. What is Orson Welles’s 1941 movie Citizen Kane about, if not an overmighty mogul in the Musk vein, as petty and vindictive as he is monstrous?

None of this is to say that the democratic order will survive this new era of defiance without damage, or even that it will survive it at all. But it is to say that we, the people, and we, the states, have an immense interest in ensuring that the democratic order does survive, in spite of all the threats. If we want, as we should, to protect systems of governance, learning and law that rely fundamentally on truth and reason, we must not spend the next few years insisting that the ideal must always be the enemy of the good enough.

• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist