Matt Purple

Theresa May begins babysitting the world’s most powerful man

Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to cheer for a football game. Trump is who he is, an energetic insult comic at his most natural when he’s dissing the size of his political opponents’ hands. Watching him strain to appear statesmanlike always leaves you with the impression that he’s been pumped full of Valium.

Nevertheless, he seems to have passed his first test, that ‘Odd Couple’ meeting with May, by which we mean he managed to get through the press conference without starting a thermonuclear war. Such are our downwardly defined presidential standards in the age of Trump. There was a brief moment of tension. After May called on a BBC reporter who asked a tough question, Trump eyed the PM and quipped, ‘This was your choice of a question,’ to laughter, and then, ‘There goes that relationship,’ to less laughter, because demolishing the transatlantic friendship over one pestering reporter is just the sort of thing Trump might do. He was kidding, however, and upon replay actually came off as rather charming.

Inhaling sharply at every jape the president makes is going to make for an exhausting four years. So, too, is the fact that both the American and the foreign press will be grilling Trump over the incendiary ideas that he regularly espouses. The debate in my country over waterboarding suspected terrorist detainees has generally been waged between those who call it ‘torture’ and believe it must stay abolished and those who prefer the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and believe it should be authorised.

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