If you think Trump is a disgrace, just look at the unelected president of Europe!

THE President of the United States is typically described as the ‘leader of the free world’.

It’s not an official title, but encompasses the sense that the President represents all of us in this country as fellow members of the club of Western democracies and the alliance that, through force of arms, preserved freedom and liberty on the continent of Europe.

So you didn’t have to be a U.S. citizen to feel profoundly offended by Donald Trump’s decision to cancel his attendance at a ceremony on Saturday to honour the Americans who gave their lives in World War I.

The White House blamed the torrential rain which allegedly provided an insuperable obstacle for the Presidential helicopter. But in such circumstances there is always a contingency travel plan — and the Aisne-Marne military cemetery, where 2,289 U.S. soldiers are buried, is only 50 miles from where the President was staying for his trip to France.

Sir Nicholas Soames, Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson, furiously observed: ‘They died with their face to the foe, and that pathetic inadequate Donald Trump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects.’ And it does seem that the President’s main concern — not for the first time — was his hair.

Ultimate

At a rally just hours after the massacre of 11 American Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue a fortnight ago, Donald Trump complained that his hair had got ‘ruined’ by the rain as he answered questions about this antiSemitic atrocity.

‘I was standing under the wing of Air Force One during a news conference earlier this morning, a very unfortunate news conference, and the wind was blowing and the rain, and I was soaking wet and that’s what I ended up with today.’

So whether it’s Jews being butchered on American soil, or the ultimate sacrifice made by young Americans on French soil, Trump’s deepest concern is not for the dead, their families and their nation, but his own ridiculous hair.

It is simultaneously both astonishing and unsurprising. And he will get away with it. After all, he got away with traducing the military valour of the late John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate and one of Trump’s most forceful critics within the party.

McCain had been badly injured when, as a naval aviator during the Vietnam war, he crashed on his 23rd bombing mission. This admiral’s son was seized and tortured by the North Vietnamese. He endured this for five years, refusing to be released before any of his captured colleagues, even though it had been offered (for propaganda purposes) by his captors.

But Trump ridiculed this, saying of McCain: ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured.’

And what of Trump’s Vietnam war record? He never served, having gained five deferments, one of them for calcium build-ups — bone spurs — in his heel.

Asked about this in 2015, Trump said he couldn’t remember which heel (left, right, or both) had been affected, though he insisted: ‘You know, it was difficult from the long-term walking standpoint.’ But not so difficult that he couldn’t enjoy his golf, squash and tennis at Wharton School, where he was studying real estate at the time.

If you are British, you might be thinking: thank goodness such a man is not our president, and how fortunate it is that our own head of state is Her Majesty the Queen, who was yesterday at the Cenotaph in Whitehall for our national tribute to the fallen.

Yet we do — for the time being — have our own President (although we don’t elect him). His name is Jean- Claude Juncker. He is the President of the European Commission, chosen in 2014 for this vital role at the pinnacle of the European Union over the furious objections of the then British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Cameron had already committed to holding an in- or- out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU: he knew the appointment of the ardent Eurofederalist Juncker would make it much harder to persuade the British people to remain reconciled to membership.

For the secretive Luxembourger (whose peculiar relationship with that nation’s security and intelligence services eventually cost him his job as Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy) epitomises the opaque and undemocratic methods which characterise EU policy-making at their worst.

Cynically

Actually, he revels in it. Thus, on the EU’s monetary policy, Juncker declared: ‘ I’m ready to be insulted for being insufficiently democratic … but I am for secret, dark debates.’ On the British calls for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, he observed: ‘Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?’

And when referendums had been called by some EU nations over what was then called the EU Constitution (the plan to turn the organisation into a nascent federal state), Juncker cynically remarked: ‘If it’s a Yes, we will say “On we go”, and if it’s a No we will say “We continue”.’

The then Labour MP Gisela Stuart was one of the Westminster parliamentarians on the committee drafting the European Constitution. Stuart — who was born and brought up in Germany — told me it was this experience which persuaded her that Britain’s long-term future could not be within such a body. She later became one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign.

Specifically, she described to me how whenever she or one of her colleagues had put in clauses with the purpose of bringing EU institutions more under the control of national electorates, they would always be mysteriously struck out at the last minute.

She realised then that this was a movement with contempt for the idea of full accountability: that they believed in change being driven by the top down, rather than from the people upwards. The latter is the legacy of Magna Carta and of British and U.S. common law — so different from the Napoleonic code in which the power of the state over the individual is much more entrenched.

Whatever you think of the society which produced Donald Trump as President, the U. S. is, at every level locally, driven by an intense belief in democratic answerability.

Outrage

It is a remarkably transparent system, which is the essential element in accountability. The extent to which its citizens are engaged in the decisions which shape their lives is part of what has made it such a vibrant society — and a model for those who seek freedom.

Compare this with the events of a few months ago in Brussels, where, in complete secrecy, Juncker managed to put his political adviser, Martin Selmayr (a 47year-old German workaholic, fanatically dedicated to the creation of a federal PanEuropean state) in charge of the entire workings of the European Commission.

No one even knew there was a vacancy for the job of Secretary General of the Commission, but the man in that job was persuaded to step down in favour of Selmayr — known as the ‘Monster of the Berlaymont’ (a reference to the way he terrorises those working in the Commission’s headquarters).

This caused such outrage in the European Parliament that an ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, was asked to investigate. Her report was scathing, accusing Juncker and Selmayr of multiple acts of maladministration. But, needless to say, they were allowed to carry on as before. Or to quote Juncker: ‘If it’s a no, we continue.’

We are now seeing the same process with the move towards a European Army, which the British people were told would never happen by the Remain campaign during the 2016 referendum, but which is now clearly the next stage of the grand plan, according to the French President Emmanuel Macron.

You might have seen Macron on TV in the company of President Juncker at yesterday’s commemorations of the war dead — as if Juncker had the same status as the elected President of a country which actually lost 5 per cent of its population in that terrible war.

I’m glad that this notoriously bibulous figure — at one and the same time both ridiculous and slightly sinister — will not be representing us for much longer. And nor will any possible replacement once we leave the EU.

As for Trump, although he turned up to speak yesterday at another memorial in France, the ceremonies at Aisne-Marne were made more dignified by his absence.