Brexiteers want a leader with Trump’s swagger. That would be the ruin of Britain
Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit have their own special relationship, distinct from the celebrated 20th-century alliance between the US and the UK. The two projects were born a few months apart, the surprise electoral twins of 2016, delivered in similar pangs of voter rage. Both promised national renewal by defying foreigners. Each was greeted as a monstrosity by liberal diplomats who liked the old special relationship, being fond of the world order it represented.
Three years later, the delinquent siblings meet, with Brexit Britain as host, Trump as guest. In developmental terms, they are stuck in political toddlerhood, struggling to articulate what they want and given to tantrums if not indulged. But they are on their best behaviour for a formal state visit. Trump laps up the pomp and frippery. He has a tinpot potentate’s vanity and appetite for parade-ground sycophancy. But the spectacle is also balm to the British ego, especially the bruised, Brexit part that feels insufficiently admired by the rest of the world. Eurosceptics kid themselves that royal hospitality will be repaid with trade concessions, while the pageantry animates a deeper nostalgia. It connects a certain British audience to memories of unalloyed majesty, when the gilded grandeur was a demonstration of hard, imperial power.
Even the backlash against the visit is tinged with that preening national self-regard. The complaint that Trump does not deserve the honour of 41gun salutes and Buckingham Palace banquets contains the assumption that those things are indeed our most precious diplomatic currency, not for squandering on the wrong person. In reality, it is just a posh circus.
There is so much about Trump that is appalling – racism, misogyny, corruption, constitutional vandalism – it is unsurprising that people protest on the streets. Less conspicuous, but more remarkable perhaps, was a dissenting note at the banqueting table, issued from the crown itself. The Queen’s words are chosen with precision and on this occasion, in a speech commemorating D-day, she emphasised the “assembly of international institutions” that rose from the ashes of war. She praised the “original purpose of these structures: nations working together to safeguard a hard-won peace”. To alert ears, that was a coded rebuke to a president who actively undermines those very structures, admires despots and belittles the leaders of America’s democratic allies. It is unlikely that Trump got the message, or cared if he did.
Disrespecting organisations that were founded decades ago can sound like a minor misdemeanour, when abetting white supremacism is also on the charge sheet. But Trump’s contempt for conventions of global cooperation is part of the same tyrannical impulse that he displays when trashing norms of civil debate and basic decency in public office. It is also the aspect of Trumpism that travels furthest beyond US borders.
Britain is uniquely susceptible to contagion: a country with delusions of global grandeur that has recently embarrassed itself in negotiation with one of those rules-based, peace-safeguarding structures. Brexiteers claimed many reasons for rejecting Theresa May’s deal, but the essential problem was that it expressed too accurately the balance of power between a lone nation state and a continent-sized bloc. It was an unsugared pill refined from bitter truths about Britain’s clout in the world. The queasy leavers spat it out.
As a result, the Tory leadership contest is unfolding in a fantasy land where the only problem with Brexit is deemed to be May’s lack of conviction in threatening no deal. Boris Johnson acts as if jovial bluster can achieve what diplomacy never could. Dominic Raab casts himself as the table-thumping tough guy. Both styles have a whiff of arrogant, Trumpian, fact-free machismo, as if their pungent, manly negotiating musk will attract previously unavailable concessions in Brussels.
The whole Tory pitch is skewed by fear of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. Farage himself has no interest in the banal practicalities of EU withdrawal. He has adapted Trump’s model of content-lite, grievance-heavy nationalism more astutely than anyone, tapping into multiple streams of public frustration and channelling them towards a single ballot-box proposition.
Farage’s party has no policies. The Brexit he demands has no legal dimensions. It is a deferred climax, intended always to be tantalisingly out of reach, like the promise to Make America Great Again. (Disappointment can be blamed on sabotage by traitors and cowards.) That is where the Eurosceptic mythology of buccaneering Albion, released from European dry dock, freetrading on the high seas, inevitably tends. It is the ideological fancy that Trump tickles on Twitter with a promise of “big trade deals once UK gets rid of shackles”.
That is no magnanimous gesture. Trump hates the EU because it upgrades countries that alone could not compete with the US into a combined entity that can. The cynical advantage in fracturing such an alliance is clear. He wants the UK to be isolated not as America’s peer but as its commercial prey.
Even setting aside ethical imperatives in upholding international rules, the Trumpian model simply isn’t viable for Britain. The US is a hyperpower, issuer of the dollar, home to the biggest companies in the world. Its economic and military mass generate an inescapable gravitational field. If its president refuses to play by old rules, other countries have little choice but to accommodate his caprice. That isn’t a noble way to behave in the White House, but it is an available strategy.
The same would not be true for some bargain-basement British miniTrump in Downing Street. Many Brexiteers fail to comprehend the difference, and their misplaced swagger comes at a price in international credibility. When the world sees the US president’s state visit to the UK, they see two nations getting drunk on pomp, enabling each other’s addiction to symbols of globe-straddling potency. But they are not of equal might, nor are their constitutions the same. Trumpism is strong liquor, which the US might just about handle. It could be the ruin of Britain.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist