On Thursday, Donald Trump’s sixth full day in office, I asked a British friend for his initial impressions. Noting that the new American President had moved swiftly, signing executive orders to end Obamacare, complete the Dakota Access pipeline, and begin building the border wall with Mexico, my friend shook his head and remarked, “The real problem is it’s not just America, is it? The whole world gets Trump, whether it likes it or not.”
In Britain, as elsewhere, there has been a widespread sense of impending catastrophe during Trump’s first week as President. Much of the chatter revolves around his transparently vindictive spirit—particularly toward Obama’s legacy—and his customary ridiculousness. Trump has long been seen abroad as an absurdly cartoonish figure, a perception compounded this week by his insistence about the size of the crowd at his Inauguration and by his spokespeople’s use of Orwellian phrases such as “alternative facts.” The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell routinely depicts Trump as a monstrous slug of a man, with a bloated body, dark-orange skin, tiny hands, huge pouting lips, puffy white eyes, and a toilet seat on his head instead of his helmet of yellow hair. The contempt for Trump spans the political spectrum: the premier cartoonist at the Murdoch-owned London Times, Peter Brookes, presents equally grotesque images of Trump. In one recent offering, he is shown as Dumbo, the Disney elephant, flying away from the United States after burying it under great piles of excrement.
Beyond the cartoons, Britain’s mainstream media serves up daily coverage of Trump that is nearly as obsessively wall to wall as America’s, and, although this is mostly carried off with the usual show of see-no-evil impartiality, the underlying shock over the new American President is often palpable. Yesterday, a friend who is a prominent British journalist, and who has been reporting on Trump’s first week in office, sent me the day’s White House press-room handout. Marked “For immediate release,” the memo was titled “Praise for the President’s Bold Action” and featured adulatory quotes from various journalists. “Yes, it’s for real,” my friend deadpanned. “Worthy of Mugabe.”
The contrast between the media’s disdain for Trump and the Tory government’s craven pandering to the President is huge, as Trump might say. As Prime Minister Theresa May prepared for her visit to the White House this week, there was a widespread sense of embarrassment in Britain over the begging-bowl nature of her trip, a sense that she had to work hard to be the first foreign leader blessed with his summons. Not long after Trump’s win, it became known that May had called to congratulate him, and that he had told her, offhandedly, to look him up if she ever came through Washington. Since then, May and her team have made strenuous efforts to appear as the most eager of Trump’s foreign cheerleaders, with a visit to Trump Tower by the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, in early January. After meeting with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, two of Trump’s most senior advisers, Johnson, who had previously described the President as a man of “stupefying ignorance,” gushed over his “very exciting agenda of change” and expressed confidence in the continuation of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain. “We are the No. 2 contributor to defense in NATO,” Johnson said. “We are America’s principal partner in working for global security and, of course, we are great campaigners for free trade. We hear that we are first in line to do a great free-trade deal with the United States. So it’s going to be a very exciting year for both our countries.”
A week later, acting on behalf of the United Kingdom, Johnson blocked a resolution in the E.U.’s foreign-affairs council that called for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The vote was widely seen as a British sop to Trump, who had said, a few days earlier, in an interview with the Sunday Times, that he expected to see British support for Israel, alongside the United States, in the U.N. Security Council.
All the thigh-kneading by May’s government appears to have paid off. Today, May spoke at a gathering of congressional Republicans in Philadelphia, and tomorrow she will meet with Trump one on one in the White House. The Prime Minister’s media flacks have made much of the fact she will be the “first foreign leader” to be received by Trump. They released advance excerpts of her Philadelphia speech, in which she urged a “renewal of the special relationship between Britain and the United States” and which contained such Maggie and Ron derivatives as “Let us lead, together, once more.”
The British will return from Washington with a little less dignity than before, but with their “special relationship” intact. Other countries are receiving more bruising treatment. Mexicans have been feeling justifiably offended by Trump for some time, but their sense of grievance has sharpened considerably since Trump’s gleeful Tuesday-night tweet that he would sign executive orders the next day to begin the construction of his long-threatened border wall. With Mexico’s foreign and economic ministers arriving in Washington to meet with their White House counterparts, and President Enrique Peña Nieto scheduled to meet with Trump next Tuesday, the announcement—in which Trump repeated that Mexico would “pay for the wall”—was obviously intended to inflict as much humiliation as possible.
Peña Nieto initially responded gamely to Trump. In a televised address on Wednesday, he said that Mexico expected respectful treatment from its neighbor and promised official protection to Mexico’s citizens living in the United States. He “lamented and reproved” the decision to proceed with the wall, and emphasized that Mexico would not pay for its construction. On Thursday, apparently incensed over Peña Nieto’s tempered rejection of his bluster, Trump fired off an ultimatum, using Twitter to tell Peña Nieto that “if Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” This afternoon, Peña Nieto responded, saying blandly but firmly, “This morning we have informed the White House that I will not attend a work meeting scheduled with POTUS for next Tuesday.”
As ever, Trump has laid down his gauntlet by tweet. Clearly, he intends to govern in the same way that he campaigned—for all the feelings of reproof that his diction and his opinions arouse in millions of people around the world. He will be motivated by his understanding that, in the modern age, branding is everything. Just as he made a fortune by cashing in on the Trump brand, Twitter’s hundred and forty characters allow him to exercise power with a minimum degree of actual statecraft. All Trump has to do, in order to control the message, manipulate the crowds, and dominate the news, is tweet. It seems worthwhile to note that, since Trump’s victory, many of my Latin-American friends have sent me their heartfelt commiserations. Almost all of them compared Trump to the populist despots who have long dominated their region. Seen from sophisticated aeries such as New York or London, their politics have often seemed clownish and tinhorn. No longer.