Donald Trump has pimped out Nigel Farage to Theresa May for the job of US Ambassador. It tells us a lot about Trump, but also about the way Britain will be perceived and treated in a post Brexit world.
Farage, of course, is happy to be pimped out by Trump in this way. Like Trump he needs to continually have his ego massaged, and the media have been happy to accommodate both men. They are junkies addicted to self-publicity, and public adulation. They are the raw material from which all demagogues, bonapartists, and dictators are forged. That Trump should suggest Farage for the job as Ambassador, shows us that Trump has absolutely no idea about the way the machinery of government works, but it also is in line with the other appointments he has made to his government over the last week, and the way he has seen taking on the job of President as just another business opportunity for him and his family to make money.
Like Boris Johnson and other Brexiteers who never thought that they would win the vote on Brexit, but who saw it as a means of promoting their own political careers, Trump probably never thought that there were enough US voters who were stupid enough to take seriously what he said, and to actually elect him. He probably did not know about Lincoln's quote that you can feel some of the people all of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time, but he was probably familiar with H.B. Barnum's statement about "one being born every minute". Standing in the election was a cheap means of obtaining publicity for his business ventures for Trump, whilst massaging his ego.
But, if the reports of nepotism being covered in the US media are anything to go by, then Trump's fairly open and brazen use of the office with antics such as his pimping of his old friend Farage are an indication of why he perhaps has not been so successful in business as his self publicity would have us believe. During the election campaign Trump talked about his old friend Hillary Clinton, now dubbed by him "crooked Hillary", being put in gaol. Now that has gone, and instead we see Trump himself coughing up $25 million in a legal settlement of claims relating to Trump University. He is facing a series of other legal challenges. As things stand, it is a question of whether it will be the Democrats, or his fellow Republicans, who are the ones to appoint a special investigator into his activities. It is increasingly also a question, with the next Congressional elections only two years away, whether it will be a Democrat or Republican led Congress that starts impeachment proceedings against him, because his Presidency is almost certain to blow up in his face, just as Brexitt is blowing up in the face of the Tories.
But, Trump's unprecedented call for the Tory government to appoint Farage as its Ambassador to the US also tells us a lot about the status of Britain in the world post-Brexit. The world rightly considers the three Brexiteers appointed by Theresa May, to be almost as much of a joke as Trump and Farage. They are more like The Three Stooges. At every turn they are treated with due contempt by EU politicians, as happened today with David Davies visit to Brussels. The reality is that Britain is a rapidly declining economic and political power, and the pace of that decline will accelerate massively once Britain is actually outside the EU.
Boris Johnson and the Tory government have responded with some sense of injured pride that Trump should even suggest to them who they should appoint as US Ambassador, but they should get used to it, because that is the way a rapidly declining Britain will be treated by all of the larger global powers, be it the US, EU, China, Russia or other economic and political blocs. Its why Britain had pooled its resources with other European countries into the EU in the first place.
There is no reason that a president Trump, or any other US President, will treat an independent UK as anything other than the equivalent of something stuck to the bottom of their shoe. The EU will have every reason to treat an independent UK as a hostile force, and will have every reason to try to diminish its economic, military, political and diplomatic influence, as soon as possible, just as any large firm tries to destroy a smaller competitor by any means possible, or to make it subservient to it.
The not unforeseen irony is that the Brexiters proposed leaving the EU in order to regain sovereignty, but the rality is that a declining Britain only had any hope of exercising any sovereignty in today's global economy, as part of the EU. What Brexit actually signifies, as the actions of Trump and the contempt for UK Ministers, by the EU politicians shows, is that rather than regaining sovereignty, Britain is about to experience the biggest decline in its sovereignty since the Norman Conquest.
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