“Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, brothers in chaos,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend.
Chaos, indeed. The two right-wing soul mates seem to be competing with one another to see who can do more damage to the political, economic, and social fabric of their respective countries.
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“On Tuesday, Parliament voted, 328 to 301, to seize control so it could debate a bill that would attempt to prevent the United Kingdom from leaving the European Union without a plan in place on October 31,” Vox explained. “The vote was greeted with cheers, and cries of ‘not a good start, Boris!’”
In the space of a few hours, the new British prime minister lost his first-ever vote in the House of Commons and his parliamentary majority too.
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The similarities between the two leaders really are striking — and I’m not just referring to their ridiculous blond hairstyles.
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Like Trump, Johnson likes to make grandiose and populist pledges — but then fails to deliver on them. His demagoguery is perhaps matched only by his incompetence.
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Both men came to power after demonizing immigrants. [...] Johnson was one of the leaders of the pro-Brexit, anti-immigration “Vote Leave” campaign and repeatedly suggested that the U.K. would be flooded with millions of Turkish migrants if it remained a member of the European Union.
Both men are also card-carrying Islamophobes.
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Both of them fail to command popular support.
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Both have cynically disregarded democratic norms.
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Both are notorious liars. Trump, according to the Washington Post fact-checkers, has told more than 10,000 untruths since coming to office less than three years ago; Johnson was fired from his job at the Times of London for falsifying quotes, while his former editor at the Daily Telegraph has referred to his “contempt for the truth.”
Both have a long and sordid history of infidelity.
Both are elitists masquerading as populists. Trump received $413 million from his father’s real estate empire and lived in a gold, three-story penthouse in Manhattan; Boris is a graduate of the upper-crust schools Eton and Oxford and, of course, a former member of the infamous Bullingdon Club.
On Tuesday, though, one key difference emerged between the men: Johnson still faces resistance on the right. Conservative Member of Parliament Phillip Lee, for example, deprived the prime minister of his razor-thin majority when he walked across the floor of the House of Commons and defected to the Liberal Democrats, the third party of British politics, while Johnson was mid-speech. Then, 21 Conservative MPs, including two former finance ministers and the grandson of Winston Churchill, voted with the opposition to wrest back control of the parliamentary agenda and try and delay Brexit, for which they were promptly expelled from the party.
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Compare and contrast such behavior with that of the congressional Republican Party, which has been shamefully complicit in all of Trump’s open bigotry, dishonesty, corruption, and authoritarianism.
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These are the spineless sycophants who have allowed a former reality TV star to hijack their Grand Old Party.
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In the coming days and weeks, as the Brexit saga continues and a possible general election is held, Johnson could find himself out of a job (which would make him, incidentally, the shortest-serving prime minister in U.K. history). If he’s ousted, leading British Conservatives can justifiably take some credit for it.
As former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted Tuesday: “Conservative MPs in UK finally standing up to Boris sadly underscores how much conservatives in the US have been cowardly in the face of Trump.”
“Cowardly” might be an understatement.
The Intercept
Very Trumpian.
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