The Trump card that wounded Brexit by Emma Schneider

There are many ways to describe Donald J. Trump: flamboyant, unapologetically brash, divisive, performative, and, depending on where you stand politically, either a crusader against political correctness or a wrecking ball with a social media account. But what few saw coming was that, across the Atlantic, Trump would inadvertently serve as a stark and humiliating mirror to Britain’s post-Brexit delusion. A tragicomic tutorial in how nationalistic bluster without a plan leads not to glory but to global irrelevance.

When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the cry was for “sovereignty,” for “taking back control,” for a renaissance of imagined imperial prowess. The Brexiteers sold it as a clean break from the bureaucratic shackles of Brussels, a return to Britannia ruling her own waves. What they didn't expect was to be handed a cautionary tale wrapped in a red tie and orange skin. Enter Donald Trump, a living embodiment of what happens when isolationism, populism, and ego take the wheel.

From the moment Trump descended that escalator to declare his candidacy with a campaign built on “America First,” the world watched the United States spiral into a parochial fever dream. Britain, meanwhile, had just voted to paddle its own canoe, preferably far away from the European mainland it blamed for fish quotas and Romanian plumbers. But as Trump’s America stumbled through trade wars, botched international diplomacy, and the burning of longstanding alliances, many in Britain began to see something eerily familiar in the chaos: a nation drunk on its own exceptionalism, discovering a hangover far more severe than expected.

Trump promised his nation greatness. Brexit promised Britain freedom. Neither explained the fine print.

If Trump showed Americans what nationalism with no roadmap looks like, he showed Britain what it was becoming. Here was the Special Relationship laid bare, a president who knew less about international cooperation than he did about tanning lotion, praising Brexit as “a beautiful thing” while barely understanding the Good Friday Agreement. And yet, there he was, standing beside various British prime ministers with all the subtlety of a nightclub bouncer at a royal wedding, urging the UK to embrace a hard Brexit and promising trade deals written in gold leaf.

But Britain wasn’t listening to the fine print, because it was busy re-enacting its Empire-era delusions, led by cheerleaders in crumpled suits and nostalgic rhetoric. Trump, however, made one thing brutally clear: Britain outside the EU wasn’t some sovereign phoenix rising from Brussels’ ashes, it was a middleweight power caught between continental isolation and American indifference.

Worse, Trump's America didn’t even offer a comforting embrace. His “America First” was also “Everyone Else Later, Maybe.” When it came to trade, Britain quickly discovered that being out of the EU meant it was negotiating alone with a man who treated diplomacy like a New York real estate deal. The “phenomenal” trade deal Trump promised was a mythical unicorn, frequently referenced, never sighted. Chlorinated chicken became a national anxiety. The NHS was suddenly “on the table.” Britain, once the architect of global coalitions, was now bartering sovereignty for soybeans and compliments from a president who graded loyalty above policy.

What Trump did accidentally, as most of his international influences go, was strip the varnish off Brexit. He didn’t create the mess, but he made it visible. Loudly, obscenely, and with a vocabulary best suited for playgrounds and tabloids.

Under Trump, Britain saw what it had become: a country that mistook bravado for strategy, nostalgia for vision, and sovereignty for loneliness. A country so eager to “go it alone” it failed to realize that global strength in the 21st century doesn’t come from chest-thumping speeches but from alliances, integration, and compromise. All the things Brexiteers told Britons were signs of weakness.

And in a way that’s bitterly ironic, Trump, through his global blunders, insults to NATO, fondness for autocrats, and contempt for multilateralism, proved to the UK that their future didn’t lie in mirroring American swagger, but in doubling down on cooperation, especially with Europe. Trump was the punchline of a joke no one in Britain wanted to hear but desperately needed.

In hindsight, Trump wasn’t the ally Brexit needed. He was the warning label it ignored.

Perhaps that’s the one good thing he gave Britain: a mirror. An exaggerated, narcissistic, orange-hued mirror that reflected not what Britain was, but what it might become if it continued down the path of jingoism wrapped in red tape. For all his obnoxiousness, Trump helped wake some people up. He became the unintentional prophet of post-Brexit regret.

No one thanked him, of course. But then again, he’d probably demand a gold-plated statue in Westminster if they did.

So here we are. Brexit is real. Trump is gone. But the lesson lingers. If Trump was the price Britain had to pay to realize there is no dignity in self-imposed isolation, then maybe—just maybe, he was worth the chaos. Not as a leader. Certainly not as an ally.

But as a lesson.

And Britain would do well to remember it before chasing its next empire of illusions.