It is not the price of bread you should worry about today. It is the price of truth. Security services have raised alarms over what they describe as a coordinated pattern of misinformation originating from Donald Trump's social media accounts. This is not about American politics. This is about the stability of our own communities.
UK intelligence analysts have been scraping data from the former president's online activity. They see a method. A rhythm. It begins with a grievance. A grievance that sounds familiar to a British ear: the system is rigged against the working man. The difference is that when Trump posts, the algorithms amplify. And those algorithms do not stop at the Atlantic.
I spoke to a union organiser in Bolton this morning. He said his members are seeing these clips on Facebook. They do not know they are watching a foreign politician. They see a man shouting about immigration, about trade deals, about jobs being stolen. It resonates. It sticks. And it fuels resentment that spills onto our own streets.
The intelligence warning is blunt: this is not careless tweeting. It is a deliberate strategy. A strategy that weaponises distrust. It targets the same people who have been failed by years of wage stagnation and regional inequality. People like my neighbours in Barnsley. People who were promised a level playing field and got a stacked deck instead.
There is a cost to this. A cost to our democracy. A cost to our cohesion. When the price of a loaf of bread goes up, you notice. When the price of truth goes down, you may not notice until it is too late. The intelligence services are right to flag this. But the real work is not in the monitoring rooms of Whitehall. It is on the doorstep. It is in the union hall. It is in telling people the truth about who is feeding them lies.
This is not about Donald Trump. This is about us. About whether our institutions can hold. About whether we can afford another crisis of confidence. The economy is already fragile. Strikes are already rising. The last thing we need is a foreign misinformation campaign pulling us apart.
The question is not just what Trump posts. The question is what we do about it. The answer cannot be more surveillance. The answer must be more trust. Rebuild the institutions that have been hollowed out. Pay people properly. Give them a stake. Then they will not reach for the easy lies of a man in a gilded tower.
For now, the warning is out. But the alarm is not enough. The work begins in the real economy. In the kitchen tables and the picket lines. That is where the resilience is built. That is where the truth lives.
