Donald + Britain = love

Donald Trump likes Britain, or at least so he says. Or is that what he says?

With the Donald, one can never be sure. When in my youth I taught English as a second language, I used to mark students down for phrasing as imprecisely as Trump does.

And I used to fail them for not knowing the difference among various names for Britain. The other day, Trump tried to make light of his ignorance, but that only made it even more evident.

“You have many different names you go by,” he said. “England, if you want to cut off a couple of areas. And you go UK, and you have Britain and you have Great Britain. You got more names than any other country in history, I think.”

This was supposed to be a joke, but I’d be prepared to wager a small sum that he really doesn’t know the difference. Actually, his own country goes by quite a few names too: America, the United States, the States, Uncle Sam, Texas…

Oops, sorry, Texas is only one political and administrative unit within the USA. But then England is also part of a greater political and administrative union, aka kingdom, that of herself, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That’s what the United Kingdom means.

Great Britain, on the other hand, is a geographical concept, not a political one. It denotes the biggest island of the British Isles, one that contains England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland, which has part of another island all to herself.

Britain is used colloquially as a synonym of either Great Britain or the United Kingdom, and it also used to refer to the British Empire, now defunct. (It’s largely defunct due to the maniacal wartime efforts of FDR’s America, but this is a separate subject.)

Trump isn’t the first man using humour, such as it is, to conceal his ignorance, and he won’t be the last. But, if you happen to meet him, ask him to define all those terms he used – I bet he won’t be able to.

One thing I can say for Trump is that his feelings about the EU and Britain’s place in it are irreproachable. He backed the Leave campaign during the 2016 referendum, correctly saying that we’d be “better off without the EU”.

When asked whether Britain had made the most of Brexit, he said, again correctly, that she hadn’t. Or, to quote verbatim, “No, I think it has been on the sloppy side…”.

That’s putting it mildly. ‘Subversive’ is the adjective coming to mind more readily, but one can understand Trump’s attempt to phrase diplomatically in the runup to his state visit to, well, whatever the country is called.

However, he then tagged on a tail end to that sentence: “… but I think it is getting straightened out.” That’s another manifestation of bone-crushing ignorance.

Rather than “getting straightened out”, Brexit is being steadily and deliberately undermined by our Labour government and its accomplices in the Tory and LibDem parties.

The Labour hierarchy is totally, and the Tory one mostly, made up of virulent Remainers, who have come back as re-joiners. Their collective efforts still make hundreds of EU laws valid in Britain, and the ‘cooperation’ (meaning the unconstitutional efforts to reverse the result of the 2016 referendum) between the EU and Britain is proceeding apace.  

The principal champion of this underhanded campaign is our PM, Sir Keir Starmer. Who, according to Trump, is “straightening Brexit out” so successfully that he deserves the highest praise.

“I really like the Prime Minister a lot, even though he’s a liberal,” said Trump. That makes one of you, Donald.

I can’t imagine anyone liking Starmer, not even his wife or next of kin. What’s there to like? Intellectual vacuity and moral decrepitude? Wholehearted attempts to destroy the country’s economy? Not so much his failure to curtail illegal immigration as his success in encouraging it? His genuflection before every heinous Marxist cause?

I shan’t hold against Trump his misuse of the word ‘liberal’, that being an established usage in his country and, increasingly and regrettably, ours. However, that term now stands for the exact opposite of its real meaning, which used to be advocacy of individual liberty and next to no state interference with quotidian life.

In America, liberalism means, not to cut too fine a point, socialism: stultifying and tyrannical wokery, replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps.

In Britain, it means more of all the same things, plus the crusade to abolish our national sovereignty and kowtow to rather revolting apparatchiks across the Channel. So none of those things get in the way of Donald’s affection for Keir?

Apparently not, and Trump explained why: “He did a good trade deal with us, which a lot of other countries didn’t do.” Oh well, how else can the president of a great country judge foreign leaders? Especially a president who projects on global affairs solely his experience of shady property deals in places like Atlantic City?

Never mind Starmer being the worst PM in (rather long) living memory, beating to that distinction even the disastrous Gordon Brown. All that matters to Trump is a deal, and I’m glad he failed in his frantic efforts to develop property in Russia. Had he succeeded in that undertaking, he’d like Putin even more than he does now, even though Putin is a war-mongering fascist.

When asked what he thought of the country with multiple names, Trump was enthusiastic, expressing that emotion in his inimitable way. Britain, he said, is a “great place – you know I own property there.” What better reason does one need?

Actually, I own property there too, but that fact plays next to no role in my liking Britain. If I were asked the same question, that fact wouldn’t come up before a hundred others, those involving the country’s history, philosophy, literature, unique contributions to political science, physical beauty, national character, language – and yes, as an afterthought, I do own a tiny piece of it.

According to Trump, he has good reasons for visiting Britain: “I want to have a good time and respect King Charles because he’s a great gentleman.” So he is, but wanting to respect King Charles suggests that Trump doesn’t respect him yet.

If he meant he wanted to pay respects to His Majesty, why didn’t he say so? You know why. The president speaks the way he thinks: imprecisely, chaotically, inconsistently and invariably spurning Mark Twain’s advice to “use the right word, not its second cousin thrice removed”.

That respect Trump feels or aspires to feel doesn’t prevent him from making threats against the sovereignty of Canada, which is part of the British Commonwealth headed by King Charles. I’d rather he respected His Majesty less and international law more.

In conclusion, Trump pulled out of his pocket that old chestnut about the two countries having a “special relationship”, adding that he was confident the UK would fight alongside the US in a war.

That’s probably true, but I’m not sure Britain can expect reciprocal loyalty on the part of the US, for as long as it’s led by Trump. I’ll spare you a compendium of his pronouncements about NATO being obsolete and Article 5 of its Charter strictly optional, but that list would include several pages of entries.

Then again, this week Trump has done another about-face, saying he is now committed to NATO and armament supplies to the Ukraine, provided someone else pays for them. Don’t you wish the most important Western country were led by someone who says what he means, means what he says, does what he promises and has discernible convictions?

A foolish consistency might have been the hobgoblin of little minds to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but not all consistency is foolish. And not all consistent minds are small.