In the age of Trump, it’s time to ditch the special relationship

When Donald Trump took the oath of office, less than 11 months ago, the word of the hour was normalisation. Let’s not treat this man like a normal president, his US opponents said, because he’s not. You can’t, for example, assume that most of what he or his White House says is the truth – as you would for a normal occupant of that office – because he is a serial and proven liar. And sometimes it will not be enough to describe his words or deeds as “controversial” or “racially charged”, because the right word will be “racist”.

For most of the past year, that normalisation debate has raged chiefly inside the US. But now it is a global question. Put simply, how should the peoples of the world handle Donald Trump?

That question has pressed in on Britain particularly sharply this week, after Trump retweeted three inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos shared by the deputy leader of the Britain First group, a faction of the far right so far off the spectrum that an unfamiliar chorus of voices united to condemn the president for legitimising its message. Even Nigel Farage and the conspiracy-theorist headbangers of America’s Infowars website could not defend him.

One can raise a quizzical eyebrow at those my colleague Marina Hyde calls the “nouveau woke”, asking what took these new critics so long. It’s not as if Trump had carefully concealed his bigotry until now. In August, he declared that white supremacists marching in Charlottesville with swastika banners and in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan included “some very fine people”. And in January – just a few hours after he had grasped Theresa May’s hand at the White House – Trump signed an executive order banning arrivals from seven proscribed countries, each with a Muslim majority.

But for Britons, his tweets this week struck closer to home: not content with demonising non-whites in his own country he was now promoting a group hellbent on spreading fear and loathing in ours. In the process, and by angering those who had previously kept silent, Trump brought a rare degree of unity to these fractured islands.