Donald Trump brings the world’s leaders to heel

US president-elect Donald Trump.

“Actually,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told a television interviewer last Sunday, “we have a longstanding special relationship with the United States. It’s based on shared values.”

Similar words have been uttered, probably, by every prime minister for the past 50 years, although I suspect May was the first to have to utter them with a face like a nauseous undertaker, after being asked whether she shared the president-elect’s value that it’s fine for a famous man to grab women by the crotch. This is ridiculous, but it is not silly. Rather, it is an early taste of what Donald Trump’s ascension to the leadership of the free world entails, domestically, for America’s allies. Everybody knows that he has coarsened American political debate. Now he begins the process of coarsening everybody else’s.

Not long ago, Trump was a useful figure for the global Right. He allowed anybody to display, with just a dash of self-righteousness, exactly what they weren’t. “Urgh,” Nick Timothy, now May’s joint chief of staff, wrote on Twitter last year, “as a Tory, I don’t want any ‘reaching out’ to Trump.” Yet last month off he went across the pond, along with his colleague Fiona Hill, to meet the Trump transition team and do exactly that. This being the same Hill who, in Dec­ember 2015, described the Donald as “a chump”. One wonders if it came up.

All of which brings us to Boris Johnson, who has been conducting his own Trump outreach this week, perhaps with a peace offering of haircare tips. Think back only six months, and his appointment as foreign secretary was being greeted with incredulity in Washington because he had recently said that Barack Obama, being part-Kenyan, was biased against Britain and that Hillary Clinton was like “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.

Yet there are two sides to Johnson’s face, and both of them have a mouth for him to put a foot into. For him, Trump was “clearly out of his mind” when he spoke of banning Muslims from entering the US, and also has been guilty of “a stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president”. What’s more, rather than saying these things for political effect (as with the Obama comments) or just a bit of a laugh (the Clinton comment), Johnson actually appeared to mean them.

Still off he went, albeit not yet to meet Trump himself, which is probably for the best. It’s fun pretending these two shaggy blowhards are much the same thing, but they aren’t really. True, both are born metropolitans now masquerading as something else, but apart from the hair, and the way you might not trust either in a taxi with your wife, that’s pretty much all they have in common. I suppose you might say that Johnson has learned to downplay his intellect for populist appeal, whereas Trump doesn’t even need to. Alone, together, with bumbling spurts of Latin, it’s hard to imagine them getting along. Which may be the nicest thing anybody has written about Johnson in months.

Trump is everybody’s problem now. Remember, this is a guy, an American president-elect, who the actual Pope described as “not ­Christian”. Francois Hollande, the French president, said Trump made him “want to retch”. Will they meet before he leaves office this year? Angela Merkel has been frosty, which is unsurprising considering their rival stances on refugees. Trump also described her as “ruining Germany”, apparently in pique, after she was Time magazine’s 2015 cover star. Yet it is inconceivable that they will not, at some point, have to share a platform.

Think of Mexico’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto. He has resisted the open fury of his predecessor Vicente Fox (who last week tweeted, and I quote, “I am not paying for that f..ken wall”) and now has the air of one of those nervous guys that Tony Soprano would take on boat trips. Do you shake Trump’s hand if you’re a Mexican? Or think of ­Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Last year, speaking to the UN, he condemned those who “reject others because they look, or speak, or pray differently than we do”. It was obvious who he was talking about, but it didn’t matter because it was also obvious Trump was going to lose.

Now Trudeau is skipping Trump’s inauguration, but even­tually the pair will have to meet. Will they be flipping burgers on the White House lawn? On the morning Trump won, the Canadian was asked at a press conference how he would explain to children that “a sexist, racist bully” was in the White House. Trudeau nodded at every epithet, and then waffled, with the eyes of a hostage. Get used to that look. You’ll be seeing it a lot.

For some, I know, all this is a ­delicious shattering of hypocrisy. The preachiness and piety of many liberals is ripe for ridicule, and it is telling that many Western leaders would stand alongside Saudi royals or Chinese placemen without any of the pious disgust they feel for the democratically elected Trump. Although anybody too ­seduced by that schadenfreude should think of May, who is no liberal hypocrite, and take a good, long look in the mirror.

Trump’s victory does not negate his flaws. His xenophobia, sexism, racism, petulance, avarice and contempt for decency are still there, and all the people who saw them, liberal or otherwise, presumably still can. Yet our leaders will defer, and they will be ashamed, and so will we. What America swallowed, the world must digest. We have Trumpism in our guts now, like threadworms. So the queasiness begins.

The Times