In a damage-done contest, it’s no contest
“Good riddance” reads a billboard in Zagreb, Croatia addressed to outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “Get Your Johnson Out of Our Democracy!” read signs outside Parliament this week after Johnson announced his resignation.
Actor Hugh Grant suggested that activist Steve Bray troll Johnson with the Benny Hill theme. “Yakety Sax” blared in the background all morning as newscasters tried to do interviews and provide on-scene commentary.
Johnson is on his way out like Donald Trump before him. Unlike Johnson, our domestic menace threw in a violent insurrection as a parting “fuck you” before leaving the White House. He has yet to face criminal charges. But the damage to both democracies is done (Associated Press):
“I will not miss him,” French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said, highlighting an open disdain unseen since the Europeans welcomed the U.S. election loss of Donald Trump in 2020. And while trans-Atlantic relations picked up quickly since the arrival of President Joe Biden, don’t expect anything similar with a new British leader, politicians and experts said.
“Even with a new prime minister, I believe there will likely be few changes in the British government’s position” on the main Brexit issues causing current divisions, said David McAllister, the leading EU legislator dealing with the United Kingdom.
Guy Verhofstadt, who was the top EU parliamentarian during the whole Brexit divorce proceedings, said Johnson’s impact was such there is little to no chance another Conservative prime minister could steer a fundamentally different course.
“The damage done by the outgoing prime minister, through the project that he instrumentalized to achieve power, lives on,” Verhofstadt wrote in The Guardian. Polling suggests 51% of people in Great Britain regret that the country followed Johnson out of the EU, while 38% do not and 11% have no opinion (thru July 7).
In the U.S., with help from Sen. Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell of Kentucky Trump’s legacy is a radicalized Supreme Court and voiding of women’s right to bodily autonomy. Trump’s legacy also includes hundreds of thousands dead who might not have died. It includes open rejection of democracy, science, and truth by his political party; embrace of criminality; more wealth for the already wealthy; more rights for gun owners and less safety for the rest of us; inflamed Christian nationalism bordering on fascism; and the demolition of faith that democratic governance has power to do anything about it.
If this were a damage-done contest between the two misleaders, Trump is the clear winner. Congratulations, Donald. It’s what you always wanted.
Jonathan Pie gives a send-off to Britian’s “sad, little liar” who sounds remarkably like our own.
“Lies, on top of lies, on top of lies. He lies and gets people to lie on his behalf, and then lies about the lying.”
Johnson’s party this week finally had enough, Pie observes. But those too-little, too-late cries “are coming from the same people who have sat and watched him take a flamethrower to their party and our constitution for three fucking years…. All of the reasons they’re getting rid of him now — lack of leadership, lack of morals, lack of integrity, lack of truth — all these traits have been in plain sight for years. His CV reads like a demons resume.”
Now, finally, these Conservative Party politicians are pretending to notice. Republicans in the U.S. see no need to. They are Trump. And Trump is them.
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