Was The US The Laughingstock Of The World Before Trump?

Photographer: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As longtime readers may remember, I lived in London from 2012 to 2018. I thus missed much of the hysteria surrounding the 2016 presidential election. When my daughter called my wife and me at about 4 a.m. (London time) after Election Day to tell us that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, we were shocked. (I guess much of America, and maybe Trump himself, were shocked, so just count us in the crowd.)

In the days after the election, however, we witnessed firsthand the reaction of folks overseas. We know — we saw with our own eyes — whether the United States was the laughingstock of the world (or, at least, London) before and after Election Day.

My parenthetical qualifier in the previous paragraph — “or, at least, London” — should make a difference to astute readers. Politically, England is much like the United States: There are liberal big cities and conservative rural areas. We saw how London, a liberal city, reacted to Trump’s election. We did not see how the rural parts of England, or the rest of the world, reacted.

This probably matters: London, for example, was dumbstruck when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016. No one in London thought that that the UK should part ways with Europe; the rest of the country begged to differ. The Brexit election results startled folks in the city.

Anyway, my wife and I would occasionally walk to the nearby BBC studio to sit in the studio audience and watch a broadcast of “Any Questions,” a political talk show on BBC 4 radio. The BBC gathered four panelists from across the British political spectrum — Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrats, and maybe Green — and a BBC presenter posed questions submitted by 10 members of the audience (which numbered maybe 500 or 600 people).

In the days after Trump was elected, any time Trump’s name came up in a question, or an answer, everyone in the place laughed. The panelists — from across the British political spectrum — and the audience — a cross-section of people who lived around London — all laughed.

Big belly laughs.

No one could believe that Americans were as stupid as they had just proven themselves to be.

As an American, this horrified me. I couldn’t help but think that America would someday need Britain’s support for something, and that support might be hard to come by if the whole country was laughing at us.

We weren’t a laughingstock before Trump was elected. We literally became a laughingstock when the election results were announced.

On another night several months later, my wife and I attended a performance of the play “Network.” (You may remember the movie: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”  In 2017, the play was a then-recent adaptation of the movie.) After the cast members took their curtain calls, a film started to play on the large screen in the center of the stage. It was soon obvious that the film showed the presidential inaugurations — the swearing in — of every American president from 1976 through the present. (The idea was to bridge the time from when the movie had originally appeared to when we were watching the play. The movie was about television; as you watched the play, you couldn’t help but think about social media, which of course hadn’t existed four decades earlier.)

The audience stood and watched Carter, and then Reagan, and then Bush, and then Clinton, and then Bush II, and then Obama take the oath of office, and no one left the theater.

A lot of people — the Lyttleton Theatre in London seats almost 900 — stood in place and respectfully watched all of the presidents get sworn in, until Trump’s image appeared on the screen. The entire place immediately broke out in boos.

Once again, as an American, I got a little nervous about our country’s reception around the world.

I understand that isolationist Trump supporters think this is irrelevant: “Why do we care what those lousy Brits think? Who needs ’em? We’re just talking about a little island in the North Atlantic. America first!”

I’m a little more internationalist than that, but I understand the point of view.

But please don’t tell me, as Trump and his gang frequently do, that we’re the laughingstock of the world without Trump at the helm.

I’ve been there and seen that: We’re the laughingstock of the world only with Trump at the helm.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at [email protected].