On Aug. 18, 2016, Donald Trump tweeted: “They will soon be calling me MR BREXIT!” This was a surprise, as just a couple of months earlier Trump didn’t appear to know what “Brexit” meant. In an interview with Michael Wolff for The Hollywood Reporter in June, he needed a lot of prompting. “And Brexit? Your position?” “Huh?” “Brexit.” “Hmm.” “The Brits leaving the E.U.” “Oh, yeah, I think they should leave.” But with his spidey sense for what the people he was against were against, Trump knew straight away which side he should be on, even if he didn’t know what the fight was about. And he was right: When the British people voted to leave the European Union in summer 2016, it boosted Trump’s presidential prospects. The impossible turned out to be perfectly possible after all.
The year 2016 is still remembered with a kind of lingering awe as the year of both Brexit and Trump — or of Brexit then Trump, as though the second somehow followed from the first. For nearly a decade since, Brexit and Trump have been treated as two parts of the same story — a familiar tale of nativism and populism unbound, the revenge of the left-behinds. But with Trump returned to the White House, it has become clear that they aren’t the same story after all. Instead of playing out in parallel, Brexit and Trump have come apart. Trump now threatens to scatter what remains of the Brexit movement to the winds.
Brexit was meant to be two things at once: a restoration — of Britain’s independence, its global influence, its lost glories — and a revolution that would cut through the political order with a chain saw. But once a Brexit deal was finally done in 2020, a choice emerged: Would Brexit be used to dismantle the administrative state — “the Blob,” as its detractors like to call it — or would the Blob simply absorb Brexit as if nothing had happened?
Britain’s politicians appear to have opted for the latter. The Brexiteers never found a way to meet the popular demand for something other than conventional politics while utilizing conventional politics to channel that demand. As a result, they are now reduced to celebrating what little scraps of the lost revolution they can get. In Britain, for the present at least, the political system is winning.
Trump has followed the opposite path. During his first term, the established order managed more or less to constrain him, even prising him out of office following an election he lost but claimed to have won. The second time around, he’s determined to burn through the institutions and conventions that stymied him back then. His problem is that he seems to have no answer to the question of what to do once he has broken established alliances and trade agreements. He has mainly chaos to offer, which pales eventually as a political prospectus.
Where Brexit and Trump once seemed to be part of the same story, each now represents a sobering morality tale for the other.