September 4 2019,
11:20 a.m.
“BORIS JOHNSON AND Donald
Trump, brothers in chaos,” read a headline in
the Los Angeles Times over the weekend.
Chaos, indeed. The two
right-wing soul mates seem to be competing with one another to see who can do
more damage to the political, economic, and social fabric of their respective
countries. The American president and British prime minister have chaos in
common, which, as I pointed out a
year ago, is not a bug of their rule; it is a feature.
And so it continues. “On
Tuesday, Parliament voted, 328 to 301, to seize control so it could debate a
bill that would attempt to prevent the United Kingdom from leaving the European
Union without a plan in place on October 31,” Vox explained.
“The vote was greeted with cheers, and cries of ‘not a good start, Boris!’”
In the space of a few hours,
the new British prime minister lost
his first-ever vote in the House of Commons and his parliamentary
majority too.
Like Trump, Johnson likes to
make grandiose and populist pledges — but then fails to deliver on them. His
demagoguery is perhaps matched only by his incompetence. Is it any wonder then
that the comparisons between the U.K. premier and the U.S. president have come thick and fast —
including, on occasion, from the two leaders themselves?
“I was in New York, and some
photographers were trying to take a picture of me, and a girl walked down the
pavement towards me, and she stopped and she said, ‘Gee, is that Trump?'”
Johnson told a
British TV interviewer in March 2016. At the time, the then-mayor of London
didn’t welcome the comparison, saying that being mistaken for Trump was “one of
the worst moments” for him and that he was “genuinely worried” about the
prospect of a Trump presidency.
The British prime minister,
though, has since become a loud cheerleader for the U.S. president, lauding his
“many, many good qualities” and heaping praise on Trump’s economic record.
The narcissist-in-chief in the
White House has, of course, returned the compliments, referring to
Johnson as “Britain Trump” and describing him as “a really good man.”
Their bromance makes sense:
The similarities between the two leaders really are striking — and I’m not just
referring to their ridiculous blond hairstyles.
The Similarities
Where to begin? Both men came
to power after demonizing immigrants. Trump called Mexicans
“rapists” and promised to build a wall to keep them out of the United States;
Johnson was one of the leaders of the pro-Brexit, anti-immigration “Vote
Leave” campaign and repeatedly
suggested that the U.K. would be flooded with millions of Turkish
migrants if it remained a member of the European Union.
Both men are also
card-carrying Islamophobes. Trump has his Muslim
ban and a long history of anti-Islam
rhetoric; Johnson once described “Islam
as the problem” and compared veiled
Muslim women to bank robbers, which led to a spike in
Islamophobic hate crimes.
Both of them fail to command
popular support. Trump obtained 3
million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in November 2016; Johnson
became prime minister in July after winning the support of only 0.13
percent of the U.K. population.
Both have cynically
disregarded democratic norms. In February, Trump declared a bogus “emergency”
at the southern border to try and fund the building of his border wall. Last
month, Johnson announced that
he would be suspending parliament for five weeks, starting September 9, to try
and circumvent opposition from British lawmakers to a “no-deal” Brexit.
Both are notorious liars.
Trump, according to the Washington Post fact-checkers, has told more
than 10,000 untruths since coming to office less than three years ago;
Johnson was fired from
his job at the Times of London for falsifying quotes, while his former editor
at the Daily Telegraph has referred to
his “contempt for the truth.”
Both are elitists masquerading
as populists. Trump received $413
million from his father’s real estate empire and lived in a gold,
three-story penthouse in Manhattan; Boris is a graduate of the
upper-crust schools Eton and Oxford and,
of course, a former member of the infamous
Bullingdon Club.
The Big Difference
On Tuesday, though, one key
difference emerged between the men: Johnson still faces resistance on the
right. Conservative Member of Parliament Phillip Lee, for example, deprived the
prime minister of his razor-thin majority when he walked across the floor of
the House of Commons and defected to the Liberal Democrats, the third party of
British politics, while Johnson was mid-speech. Then, 21 Conservative MPs,
including two former finance ministers and the grandson
of Winston Churchill, voted with the opposition to wrest back control of
the parliamentary agenda and try and delay Brexit, for which they were promptly
expelled from the party. “This is not how any of us expected our
careers in the Conservative Party to end,” said former
Conservative minister Sam Gyimah, before adding that he was “proud” of his role
in helping to halt a “damaging” no-deal Brexit.
Compare and contrast such
behavior with that of the congressional Republican Party, which has been
shamefully complicit in all of Trump’s open bigotry, dishonesty, corruption,
and authoritarianism.
Take the U.S. Senate, where
Trump’s former GOP opponents have either left the scene or rolled over. John
McCain is dead; Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have retired; Mitt Romney likes to
issue pained statements but
little else; Ben Sasse long ago went
quiet online; and Lindsay Graham and Rand Paul have morphed from Trump critics to Trump apologists.
Ted Cruz, whose father and wife were smeared and mocked by
Trump, now hosts rallies with
the president and gushes over
his “achievements on behalf of ordinary Americans” and — don’t laugh — “strong
stand against North Korea.”
In the House, Rep. Justin
Amash quit the party after becoming the sole
Republican to call for the president’s impeachment, but the rest of
his (former) GOP colleagues have stayed in the party — and stayed silent. Racist
tweets about “the Squad”? See no evil. Crying
kids separated from their parents at the border? Hear no evil.
Condemning American Jews as “disloyal” and
Latino immigrants as invaders?
Speak no evil.
These are the spineless
sycophants who have allowed a former reality TV star to hijack their Grand Old
Party.
In the coming days and weeks,
as the Brexit saga continues and a possible general election is held, Johnson
could find himself out
of a job (which would make him, incidentally, the shortest-serving
prime minister in U.K. history). If he’s ousted, leading British
Conservatives can justifiably take some credit for it.
As former Obama adviser Ben
Rhodes tweeted Tuesday:
“Conservative MPs in UK finally standing up to Boris sadly underscores how much
conservatives in the US have been cowardly in the face of Trump.”
“Cowardly” might be an
understatement. Quivering Republicans have turned the party of Lincoln into a
cult of Trump. They are the president’s supine enablers — and history won’t be
kind to them.
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