“BREXIT-plus-plus-plus” was how Donald Trump—who additionally referred to as himself “Mr Brexit”—termed his pitch to voters throughout his profitable presidential marketing campaign. Positive sufficient, many Individuals will quickly be waking up quickly to a sense just like the one Remainers in Britain skilled on the morning of June twenty fourth: bafflement on the failure of so many polls to foretell the outcome, shock on the voters’s defiance of skilled opinion, concern for liberal values. If Mr Trump relishes the comparisons it’s as a result of he identifies with the architects of Britain’s departure from the European Union: like him, privileged demagogues deft at manipulating the general public’s worst fears and instincts.
But these affinities confer few apparent benefits on Britain. Mr Trump could admire the nation’s current choice, however he’ll make an unpredictable, unfamiliar accomplice—particularly in contrast with Hillary Clinton, an instinctive Anglophile. It says one thing concerning the rapid way forward for the “particular relationship” so revered in London that the British politicians most skilled in coping with America’s president-elect are Nigel Farage, a Brexiteering rabble-rouser (who stumped for him and is presently flying to Washington, DC to ingratiate himself additional with the incoming administration) and Alex Salmond, a former first minister of Scotland (whom Mr Trump branded “a has-been and completely irrelevant” in a tiff over a Scottish golf resort).
