Similar, But With Critical Differences

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2024, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Social commentary

I have often noted the similarities between Boris Johnson of the UK and Donald Trump, starting with the creepy things each wear upon their heads, the mysterious way in which each has garnered an almost cultist following, the way each seems to think their office is created for their own personal gain, and more.  In all my comparisons, though, I have felt that Johnson was the less dangerous of the two, that he lacked the utter cruelty and vileness of Trump.  And now, I have been proven right.  While Trump has spent more than two years railing that his defeat was illegitimate, calling for violence by his followers, throwing the nation under the bus, and is by all accounts planning further demolition by throwing his hat in the ring yet again in 2024, Johnson did finally resign.  Max Boot, writing for The Washington Post takes the comparison further, looking at the difference in the systems as well as the two players.

Tories awaken to the cost of being led by an entertainer. The GOP still hasn’t.

Max Boot, Columnist

July 8, 2022

Every stage of Boris Johnson’s political progression has been utterly ludicrous and farcical — and that extended to his downfall, or “clownfall,” as the Economist dubbed it. Suddenly, in the past few days, there was a mass exodus from the British government among cabinet ministers who professed themselves to be shocked by the prime minister’s duplicity. “A decent and responsible Government relies on honesty, integrity and mutual respect,” thundered Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis in his letter of resignation.

Well, yes. But it’s hardly news that Johnson possesses none of those qualities. Dishonesty wasn’t a bug in the BoJo operating system, it was the system itself. “People have known that Boris Johnson lies for 30 years,” says Rory Stewart, a former Conservative member of Parliament. “He’s probably the best liar we’ve ever had as a prime minister.”

In this respect, Johnson was very much like former president Donald Trump. The difference, of course, is that while Trump continues to exercise an inexplicable hold on his political party, Johnson’s grip has finally been broken. The questions are: How could Conservatives have ignored for so long what was so blindingly obvious? And how can Republicans still stay in denial?

Until this week, the Conservative Party chose to overlook Johnson’s pathological mendacity because he was so popular. The secret of his popularity was that he was terrifically entertaining. Like a certain orange-tinted former U.S. president, he did not present as a normal politician. He made a virtue of his lack of seriousness to make it seem as if he was just a regular bloke despite his posh background. He bumbled his way to the top.

But the joke wore thin when Johnson actually had to govern. He promised to miraculously make Britain stronger and wealthier by exiting the European Union; he’s achieved just the opposite. Johnson’s management of the covid pandemic was no more successful. A House of Commons committee found that Johnson “made a serious early error” by flirting with the crackpot theory that allowing people to be infected would lead to “herd immunity.” The result was “many thousands” of avoidable deaths.

Eventually, Johnson instituted a strict lockdown, but he failed to abide by it. The result was the “Partygate” scandal, as evidence emerged of Johnson and his aides illegally partying at 10 Downing Street. Johnson was finally felled by one scandal too many. His chief deputy whip, Chris Pincher (a name straight out of Dickens), had to resign after being caught groping men in a bar. Johnson professed shock, until it emerged that he had been informed of similar misbehavior in the past when he had brought Pincher into the Foreign Office.

The lessons of Johnson’s rise and fall are simple and old-fashioned: Don’t treat politics as a branch of the entertainment industry; it’s too serious for that. Knowledge and competence are important in leaders; their lack is not a virtue. And character counts above all: Someone who can’t be trusted to tell the truth can’t be trusted to govern. It’s staggering that it’s taken the Tories this long to accept those basic home truths.

What’s even more staggering is that Republicans in the United States still have not, even though Trump’s political sins are far more serious. Johnson did not, after all, incite a mob to ransack Parliament in order to stay in power. His offenses are political misdemeanors compared to Trump’s major felonies.

Why, then, is the BoJo show closing while the Trump show rolls on? In part it’s because British politics is less populist and Tories are less radicalized than Republicans; there are Murdoch-owned newspapers but no Fox “News” Channel in the U.K. It’s also because British political parties are more powerful. While Tory parliamentarians don’t choose their leader, they do winnow the field down to two candidates for a vote by the party rank and file. Even if the winner becomes prime minister, that person can be, and often is, toppled by colleagues in the cabinet and the House of Commons.

If the United States had a similar system, with the Republican establishment in control of the primaries, the likely GOP nominee in 2016 would have been Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump. And if it were routine for Congress and the Cabinet to evict underperforming presidents, Trump might not have lasted long in office.

But our political parties are too weak and our standards for evicting an incumbent are too high: The president has to commit either “high crimes and misdemeanors” or be unable to discharge “the duties of his office.” Of course, Trump did commit high crimes and he was unable to discharge his duties. But Republicans feared the wrath of their rabid base if they were to make him the first president ever removed under either the Constitution’s impeachment clause or the 25th Amendment. (Richard M. Nixon resigned before being impeached.)

Now, despite everything, Trump could still make a comeback, because he retains a Svengali-like hold on the Republican base. It’s a tribute to the British political system that Boris Johnson is finally being removed from office, and a terrible indictment of the U.S. political system that Trump — who has done far worse — could still return to it.

31 thoughts on “Similar, But With Critical Differences”

  1. When I moved to France, Johnson was mayor of London. Many French people thought he was a comedian who”played” at being the mayor. Sadly not and worse was to come…….

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    • Another thing, then, that BoJo had in common with Trump, for many here thought of him as an entertainer, a clown. Sadly, though, Trump doesn’t have the same … values? scruples? morals? whatever it was that convinced Boris to give it up, while Trump, even in exile, is still swearing he’ll be back. It’s chilling to me … I cannot live in this country if he returns to power. Cannot. Simply cannot.

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  3. Rumour has it Johnson wants to run in the leadership contest! I don’t know if he’s even allowed to, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he thinks he should be allowed to. Boris Johnson is a sociopath, who genuinely cannot understand why his behaviour is wrong, and cannot understand stand why the peons won’t let him do whatever he wants.

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  4. Jill, it was not hard to predict things would not end well for Boris. It was also fitting the weight of a failed Brexit implementation fell on his shoulders as he was one of the many who did not fully grasp the complexity of change.

    As for our former president, many of us lamented the failure of the Republican Party to rid America of the deceitful and seditious Donald J. Trump. The answer to the base who would have cried foul would be he tied our hands by his actions and we took an oath. Instead, outside of about ten GOP Congress reps and six Senators, the Republicans decided to fully open Pandora’s Box putting our country and their party at risk. We cannot have a president or any citizen do what Donald Trump did. Full stop.

    Boris is not the best of leaders or managers, but he is not corrupt and deceitful acting as the former US president. That is what this independent and former Republican believes. Keith

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    • Good points, Keith, and I agree. Boris was not the right man at the time of Brexit for the UK, and yes, he put his own needs/wants ahead of the good of the nation, but he was not cut of the same dastardly, evil cloth that Trump is. The UK, like our own nation, is in a tight spot, though, for they have no bright shining star on the horizon ready to step into 10 Downing Street. They will be faced with other choices, ones that will hopefully be better than Johnson, but will still be lacking.

      As for our GOP … I shudder to think that they are STILL covering for Donnie, still elevating him in their party, and that there is still a chance, hopefully a VERY SLIM chance, that he could return to the Oval Office. If he does, all bets on democracy are off, for he and his cronies will have learned lessons from the past two years and won’t give us the chance to thwart their ambitions again.

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  5. I’m not sure that our politics are less popularist than yours – Johnson winning the last election would seem to disprove that comment. As I’ve mentioned before we now have two tv channels trying to be our Faux News equivalent. Hopefully they never get the same percentage of viewers!

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    • Just as I thought … and still think … that Trump’s election was pushback against having had a Black (a very competent Black) president for two terms, I wonder if Boris’ election wasn’t pushback as well … perhaps for Thatcher? Just a thought. Yes, I hope Murdoch’s networks fail spectacularly over there … Fox over here is a growing danger, for they exploit the ignorance of about 40% of the populace.

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      • I don’t think it was pushback, more a case of his choice to support Brexit coming to fruition. That had always been his aim, and his spectacular failure was for me the proof that Brexit was always doomed to fail too. It will take years to repair the damage.

        I hope no media outlet here ever gets as powerful as Fox is there!

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        • True … you make a good point. And yes, it will take years, more likely decades, to repair the damage of Brexit. I like to think that the people of the UK are smarter, more savvy than a large portion of the U.S. But then …these days I just don’t know about the future for either of our countries. If it wouldn’t be a blatant violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of the press, I would love to see Fox dismantled and taken off the air, since people here have proven they are too ignorant to know the difference between fact and fallacy. It will be the downfall of this nation … I’m betting on it.

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          • I think the fact that a majority of those who voted – but not of the whole population – chose Brexit would suggest to me that we are a similar bunch of clueless numpties to the ones that you have there. It often gets overlooked that the referendum only had ‘advisory’ status: it could have been used as a powerful bargaining chip to get us a better deal within the EU but the Tories decided to use it as a weapon of mass destruction instead.

            I hope your prediction is wrong, but it’s going to take some massive changes in approach and attitude there for it not to happen.

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            • It’s been 77 years since the end of World War II. A full lifetime. I wonder if people today, who never knew, didn’t personally experience or even experience through the lens of their parents and grandparents, have become so bored, so complacent, that they cannot stand relatively functional governments and relatively peaceful lives? I still have some slim hope that we … and you guys … can turn things around, but with each passing atrocity, that hope becomes dimmer.

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              • I was born in Dover 8 years after WW2 ended and had daily reminders of the recent history as I grew up. I think you’re right, and even things like Ukraine don’t seem to shake people out of that complacency.

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                • I was born just 6 years after WW2 ended. Like you, I had frequent reminders, not because of where I lived, but because I had a father who had fought in the war, and grandparents and a great aunt & uncle who had been victims of the Holocaust. The stories they all told were so real, so filled with passion, that as a child, I often felt I had been there. With each successive generation, though, the stories begin to die out, to lose the passion, and people don’t have that … point of reference, for lack of a better way to say it … that we had. And you’re right … even the horrors of what is happening in Ukraine takes a back seat for most people to such things as the price of fuel. I’ve concluded that far too many people are very shallow. Sigh. It is that, I think, that enables those who are evil to succeed.

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                  • My parents weren’t active in the war. My Mum served in the Air Force, in a desk job in London, and my Dad was too young when it started, and had a dodgy arm that got him excused when he reached service age. My reminders were the destruction of the town I grew up in, which was undergoing a huge regeneration. With local history going back to pre-Roman times our Museum was a wonderful place to learn. As time goes by people forget, or are too self-centred to care.

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                    • I cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a town that had been devastated by the war. Yes, people forget and of late I’ve come to realize that most people are so focused on the here and now, on today’s troubles, that they are incapable of thinking about the long-term consequences. I think that if people in the U.S. don’t take off their blinders, we will see those consequences sooner than many believe.

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                    • It was a mass of bomb sites being rebuilt, with the occasional evacuation when an unexploded one was discovered! You’re right that people don’t look enough to the future, which is why, for example, most of those vying to be the new Conservative leader here do no more than pay lip service to climate change action – or are actually ignorant of the issue.

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                    • ‘Tis the same here, regarding climate change action. Just today, Senator Manchin, who is largely invested in the coal industry, said he would not vote for any bills containing spending to combat climate change. And Kevin McCarthy, a prominent Republican in the House, keeps pushing for more oil drilling here, especially on protected lands. Are they really that blind? Our air is already nearly un-breathable … we have daily air quality alerts telling us not to leave our homes, and the temps are 10-20 degrees higher than normal. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

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                    • Many said they wished he would switch parties, but at the moment, that would give the Republicans a majority in the Senate. Not that it matters much. Yep, money talks … louder than I ever knew. I guess I’m lucky that I never had enough of it to speak above a faint whisper! 😁

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      • if anyone is the racist, it’s you. you always, every single time, put black before obamas presidency, he was the first black president, people didn’t like him because he was black, etc. you’re the one highlighting his character of immutable race, not most of us who didn’t like his ideas and for the record, people who didn’t like him because of his skin tone are terrible but people who believe he was qualified or did a good job because of the same aren’t much different than the former. Think about it. and if me calling you a racist in this instance means that you’re not going to publish my comment, which I believe does have some merit, well, that will be really sad.

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        • Thank you, Scott. This will be your last comment on Filosofa’s Word. From this point forward, your comments will go directly to Spam and I will not retrieve them. I don’t know why our friendship devolved into hatred on your part, but … frankly, I don’t need your ridiculous accusations and name-calling. Good-bye, my once-upon-a-time friend.

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  7. I always referred to Johnson as Boris “Yeltsin” Johnson because he was a drunk with a bad hair due. President Trump, hated by the Democrat Party left, has nevertheless proven himself a policy genius. Everything was good under President Trump. Everything is bad under Brandon. Boris “Yeltsin” Johnson is but a distraction.

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    • If you are serious about calling Trump a “policy genius” then I have to question your sanity. He was anything BUT a policy ‘genius’ and in fact was a disaster. NOTHING was good under Trump!!! What have you been smoking???

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