Donald Trump admires a typical resident of the UK

There was a debate today in the Palace of Westminster on a proposal to urge the Home Secretary to ban Donald Trump from entering the United Kingdom. Mr Trump is a demagogic politician whose support in his bid to become US president is based primarily on nationalistic resentment. Therefore, it would be difficult to imagine a development more perfectly calculated to increase his support and to improve his odds of becoming his party’s nominee for that office than a formal censure of him by the former colonial power, especially if that censure is delivered a few days before the voting begins in the first electoral contests.

This much is so obvious that one cannot suppress a cynical curiosity as to the true motives of those sponsoring the proposal. The foremost advocates of the recommendation represent predominantly Muslim constituencies. Why would members of parliament representing people towards whom Mr Trump has shown such extraordinary hostility embrace a proposal that would do more than anything else in their power to help him become president of the United States? Well, in the first place, it is unlikely the Home Secretary will actually take any such action. So they can go home and tell their constituents that they did something to express their alarm at the rise of so objectionable a figure, without triggering any real-world consequences.

If by some odd chance Mr Trump actually were banned from entering the UK, his resulting surge of support in the USA would certainly bode ill for British Muslims, especially if it were to take him all the way to the White House. But it might not harm Muslim M.P.s.  On the contrary, they would be able to invoke fear of him and of the USA to consolidate support for themselves as a last line of defense for British Muslims in an openly hostile West.

Moreover, a President Trump, taking office after the UK government had taken a stand against him in so dramatic a fashion, would be in a position to inflict almost unlimited humiliations on that government. If you wonder how that would play out, just think of the consequences of John Major’s decision to actively promote George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 1992.  In the period from 20 January 1993 to 1 May 1997, John Major’s life took on an almost nightmarish quality as Bill Clinton demonstrated time and again just how severely an American president can punish a British prime minister who displeases him. Mr Clinton did all of that out of the public eye, as a purely private vendetta. Imagine what Mr Trump could do with the full force of US public opinion behind him. The sponsors of this recommendation, in a world where the news is daily showing the prime minister, the cabinet, the Queen, and all of the other nominal leaders of the UK crawling on their bellies and begging the US president to relent from his wrath against them, might even attract support from non-Muslim Britons disgusted by that desperate tableau. They might emerge as symbols of patriotic defiance against the power that was grinding Britain into the dust and exposing its leaders as gormless sycophants.