Did Trump help swing the British election against the Tories?

Idon’t want to exaggerate Donald Trump’s importance in last Thursday’s snap election in Britain: this was an election about the British economy and the British national interest. But this was also an election that produced some very close results. Had a few hundred votes gone the other way in a handful of constituencies, Theresa May’s Conservatives would still have their parliamentary majority. And so the question has to be asked: on the margins, did President Trump help swing the British election against the Tories? I would argue yes — and in three ways.

1. May’s triumphant, lovey-dovey meeting with Trump in January, a few days after the inauguration, paradoxically made her look weak. Having wrenched Britain away from Europe, she seemed to be running to Washington looking for friends — any friends. Her quick announcement of a forthcoming Trump state visit to Britain went down extremely badly: nearly 2 million people signed a petition against it. A film clip of May holding Trump’s hand — apparently he doesn’t like walking down stairs — featured in a pro-Labour music video and numerous cartoons, also reinforced May’s unpleasant “hard-right” image. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, attacked May as an American puppet: “Waiting to see which way the wind blows in Washington isn’t strong leadership.”

2. Trump’s vitriolic Twitter attacks on the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack here a week ago made the U.S. president seem even more odious. More to the point, his tweets were denounced (and Khan was praised) by pretty much everybody speaking in any public forum, from television to social media to the local pub — everybody, that is, except May. She dodged questions about Trump’s tweets before eventually conceding, rather woodenly, that “I think Sadiq Khan is doing a good job and it’s wrong to say anything else.” This didn’t go down at all well, especially in London, where Labour’s numbers were way up.

3. Trumps’s well-known views on Europe made the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seem more sane and more mainstream than would once have been the case. Corbyn is famously anti-American, anti-NATO and anti-transatlantic alliance, as you would expect given his Marxist past. This should have been a strike against him in Britain, where the alliance with America has historically been popular. But now we have a U.S. president who is also publicly skeptical of NATO, who has little time for the transatlantic alliance, and who is in addition considered here to be incompetent and irresponsible. To put it differently, it is hard for Conservatives to argue “Corbyn is wacky and dangerous” when the U.S. president is seen as even wackier and far more dangerous.

Once again: the influence of the U.S. president is not a major factor. But if European leaders facing electorates keep their distance from Trump in the future, don’t be surprised.