The Great Disrupter
When he meets tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump “remembers his manners”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. It’s only when he meets democratic leaders – particularly women – that he likes to play the tough guy, “visiting humiliation” on America’s faithful allies. Last week, Britain provided the US president with a full-dress banquet at Blenheim Palace, followed by tea with the Queen and an itinerary that allowed him to “chopper around” the country pretending there weren’t large crowds gathering to protest their hatred for him. And what did Theresa May get in return? “A series of insults calculated to undermine and weaken her.” Trump trashed May’s plans for Brexit, telling The Sun that she “didn’t listen” to his advice on how to negotiate. Her deal, he said, wasn’t what people had voted for in the referendum, and would “probably kill” the prospects of an Anglo-american free-trade deal. For good measure, he declared that Boris Johnson would make “a great prime minister”.
Trump displayed “appallingly bad manners”, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. “Imagine his rage” if the roles had been reversed, with May bad-mouthing him in The New York Times before an official visit to Washington. (Even he seemed to realise that he had overstepped the mark: he disowned his interview with The Sun, calling it “fake news”, and was “gushing” in his praise for the PM at Chequers on Friday, declaring: “I would give our relationship with the UK the highest level of special.”) But good manners can conceal the truth, and for all his rudeness, Trump often has a point. It is true, “as a matter of plain fact”, that May’s Brexit White Paper will make a full trade deal with the US impossible. Nor does it honour the referendum result. Who can doubt that most of the 17.4 million voters who backed Leave “will have raised a cheer at Trump’s plain-speaking”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. If only our own leaders would show “some of the Great Disrupter’s courage and clear-sightedness”. As Johnson recently pointed out, “if Donald Trump had been negotiating our exit from the EU, we would not be stuck in the ditch” that we are in.
How fascinating that Trump is the Brexiteers’ “new pin-up”, said Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. Never mind his vulgarity, his lies, his “sexual peccadilloes”, his caging of immigrants and the fact that he regards the US media as “the enemy of the people”. What counts is that he “thumbs his nose at the EU”. In fact, Trump may not have done the Brexiteers much of a favour, said The Economist. He made it very clear that there is a choice to be made: “do you follow EU regulations, or American ones”? Free trade with the US and frictionless access to the EU single market are incompatible. For Britain, the answer ought to be clear: nearly half its trade is with the EU, and less than a fifth with the US. But either way, Trump has shown us that we will not be able “to have the best of both worlds”.