Donald trump may not be our favourite president, but it would be foolish to make an enemy of him | thearticle

It is difficult to be objective about American presidents. The good ones are never quite as good, nor the bad ones quite as bad, as people assume at the time. Barack Obama received such

goodwill and spread so much stardust around that most Britons still haven’t noticed the paucity of his legacy. By contrast, Donald Trump arrives with such low expectations that it is a

positive relief to be reminded that the Anglo-American special relationship is bigger than any one person. Yesterday Alexander Woolfson argued here that this relationship is dying because

Trump is presiding over the dismantling of the liberal institutions, above all Nato, which have their origins in the sacrifice of D-Day. The special relationship would not be special if it

did not allow for plain speaking. The Queen’s speech at their state banquet unambiguously defended those postwar institutions, without being too specific about whether the EU was included

among them. The President’s response was cordial. He spoke of the “bond” sealed in “that great crusade” against Nazi Germany, fought in the name of “freedom, sovereignty, self-determination,

the rule of law and reverence for the rights given to us by Almighty God”. Some will quibble with this list, but the Queen is not among them. She is, after all, our Sovereign and

sovereignty is the basis of national self-determination. Hitler had to be defeated and the Soviet Union resisted so that European nations could live in freedom under the rule of law.

Democracy ought perhaps to be added to the list, but does anyone seriously suggest that Trump is an enemy of democracy? This President, on the contrary, is rather more sensitive than most to

the threats posed by regimes, such as China and Iran, that actively oppose the spread of freedom, democracy and the rule of law in the Far East and the Middle East. Indeed, the focus of

today’s talks will be on the risks involved in allowing Huawei to infiltrate British telecommunications and the dispute between Europe and the US over the Iranian nuclear deal. On these

important questions of national security, experts are divided on both sides of the Atlantic. But it is Europe, including the UK, that leans towards doing deals with dictatorships. So it is

unfair to accuse Trump of abandoning the West, let alone of appeasement. What about the accusation that he is the leader, or at least the figurehead, of a wave of nationalists and populists

who are undermining Western values? It is true that he is disinclined to condemn “illiberal” politicians such as Victor Orbàn, the Hungarian Prime Minister, whom he recently received in the

White House. Trump admires leaders who share his opposition to open borders and, like them, he is suspicious of Islamist influence. But border anxiety is perhaps the dominant political issue

in the West, from California to the Carpathians. To ignore fear of unlimited migration is to disdain democracy. Trump’s core issues, however distasteful to liberal elites, are mainstream

ones. He refuses to be ashamed of capitalism and Christianity, for example. True, he is vigorous in using his constitutional powers to make the US judiciary more conservative, and supports

others who do the same, such as the Law and Justice Party in Poland, or Netanyahu in Israel. But liberal and socialist leaders do the same. It is no accident that every member of our own

Supreme Court, for example, voted Remain. Judges do not have to share the politics of the people to dispense justice according to the law. But alarmist predictions that Trump would transform

the United States into a one-party state, or that he is Putin’s puppet, now seem merely ridiculous. You do not have to like this President to see that he is his own man. Does that mean Tory

leadership hopefuls should fawn at the court of the Donald? Of course not. Boris Johnson is too canny to let himself be seen as anyone’s poodle. The model to emulate is not Tony Blair and

George W. Bush, but Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not everyone liked them, either, and they often disagreed. But in the complex web of trade diplomacy, security issues and human

rights, the British and the Americans should be — and usually are — more often on the same side than any other two nations. Brexit is a matter for Britain alone to determine, but Trump is

not wrong to see it also as a declaration of independence from the European Union. As such, he is offering to do with us what he does best: deals. It makes sense to see what the most

powerful person on the planet has to offer. Whoever succeeds Mrs May as Prime Minister will need to get the measure of this mercurial man. But all presidents are mortal; what endures, and

cannot be ignored, is the power, hard and soft, of the United States of America. This state visit was condemned and boycotted by Jeremy Corbyn before it had even happened. Now that it has

taken place, we can see just how unfit for office that judgement makes him.