Daniel Dale catches Trump in another delusion:
President Donald Trump told a story on Monday about how he “made a correct prediction” about the outcome of the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum while he was visiting his golf course in Scotland “the day before the vote.”
“You remember?” he asked reporters.
They couldn’t have remembered. It didn’t happen.
Trump actually visited Scotland the day after the Brexit referendum, not the day before it. And while he did say about three months prior that he thought the UK would end up leaving the European Union, he made no public predictions in an interview the day before the vote – saying he personally favored Brexit but also that “I don’t think anybody should listen to me because I haven’t really focused on it very much.”
When Trump was running for president in 2016, he hadn’t even heard of Brexit. Michael Wolff interviewed Trump for the Hollywood reporter.
“And Brexit? Your position?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“Brexit.”
“Hmm.”
“The Brits leaving the EU,” I prompt, realizing that his lack of familiarity with one of the most pressing issues in Europe is for him no concern nor liability at all.
“Oh yeah, I think they should leave.”
He didn’t know much more in 2018 when he was president:
During a news conference on Thursday ahead of his trip to Great Britain, President Trump was asked an extremely basic question about Brexit.
“You are going to the U.K. — what will be your message on Brexit?” a reporter asked him.
Trump was completely unprepared to respond in any substantial or coherent way. Instead, he began by defensively claiming he has “been reading a lot about Brexit over the last couple days.” But after a few seconds of stammering, he admitted, “I have no message. It is not for me to say.”
The president quickly pivoted to providing a free plug for his private club in Scotland, talking about his family connections to the U.K., and offering platitudes like: “I would like to see them be able to work it out so it could go quickly, whatever they work out.”
After about a minute of Trump’s dissembling, the reporter followed up by trying to get him to be specific about the extent to which he’d like to see the U.K. withdraw from the European Union.
“Hard Brexit?” he asked.
But Trump was barely familiar with what the term means.
“I thought you said it was ‘heart breaking,’” Trump quipped. “I would say that, you know, Brexit is Brexit. It’s not like — I guess when you use the term ‘Hard Brexit,’ I assume that’s what you mean. The people voted to break it up, so I imagine that’s what they’ll do, but maybe they are taking a little bit of a different route.”
Trump finished his “answer” with complete non sequiturs about his 2016 electoral win, and his popularity in the U.K.
I think it’s clear he doesn’t know anything more about it today.
But that’s ok. Treasury Scott Bessent actually had the nerve to say this: