Comment: A state visit offered in haste and regretted at leisure Published on: 3 June 2019 Writing for The Conversation, Martin Farr discusses what Donald Trump's state visit to the UK says about the 'special relationship' between the two countries. , US President Donald Trump鈥檚 state visit to the UK was offered with , from a . Delayed once, , the president has now arrived in the UK. But greater than the usual preoccupation with the is the question of whether there is now even a settled relationship. Given that the experiences of presidents and prime ministers derive from both structural alliance and individual contingency, can the relationship withstand a president whose very appeal has been eschewing conventions, legacy ties, and alliances? In an age of new normals, there may be need for new norms. Some previous relationships worked because of a similarity of outlook. This was true for , and for . Others worked through a chemistry, be it personal or generational or a combination, such as , , and . Some worked, forged as they were by war, notably , and . Some did not work 鈥� such as , and . But no president and prime minister have been as dissimilar and as incompatible as Donald Trump and Theresa May. An unusual relationship Even when there had, in the past, been disagreements there were always trammels: diplomatic language; due process. This president behaves , this prime minister too much, restraint. Fitting neatly with her unmanageable Brexit inheritance, from the moment Trump won the election, May faced an unenviable choice. She could either defy popular opinion to strategically embrace an international pariah or, opt for the more popular tactic of shunning him. As it turned out, he was . However implausible their paring, Trump and May were bound by a similarity of circumstance. As with the of the 1980s, and the of the millennium, they found themselves in office at the same time and as a consequence of respective . The shock results of the EU referendum and the US presidential election occurred five months apart and shared many of the same characteristics and many of the same characters. But while the president has brilliantly channelled and exploited the public sentiment that propelled him to power, the prime minister has been far less convincing. May had come to office by the very virtue of not having taken a stand on the great issue of the day; he had been elemental to it. Both countries were sharply divided. In the UK more than at any time without war all other matters were subsumed in one all-consuming and often traumatic national debate; in the US the president was the debate. Insofar as each was a beneficiary of exceptional circumstances there was at least the possibility of mutual utility on which to base special relations. But this was a prime minister who, more than any other, had circumscribed herself, by having quite unnecessarily called, and effectively lost, a general election she had confidently expected to win convincingly. Her already subordinate position was weakened further. Of the greatest political challenge to Britain in peacetime, the president, claimed paternity () and was keen to demonstrate shared endeavour: Brexit meant that trade would complement security and intelligence as the cement of the special relationship. But it also meant there was an opportunity for Trump to leverage the UK: he would be working with a prime minister with an even greater imperative than usual to establish a close connection with the US. A sign of the times Some have still to adapt to the new norms. The BBC recently regarded Trump鈥檚 as 鈥渁 highly unusual intervention鈥�, but it was no longer unusual. Before his in 2018 he (as he has since). Then, once he had arrived, while standing next to her, he (as he has ). The publicly stated grounds for the president one of currently 13 candidates to replace May, are : 鈥淚 have a lot of respect for Boris [Johnson]. He obviously likes me, and says very good things about me.鈥� There is more to it than that: the broader commonalities behind Brexit and Trump. Brexit also connects Trump and Nigel Farage. In an early transgression, Trump advocated the latter as the . In the latest, he promoted Farage as and plans to meet with him during this visit, contrary to the wishes of the host government. Even a bilateral meeting with the prime minister appears to have been cancelled. It is less that protocols have been breached than it not being clear if there are any protocols left. This is a state visit offered in haste and regretted at leisure. To cap it, no prime minister has had to ensure the humiliation of knowing in advance that a presidential visit is the end of their premiership. Misleading as it may be overly to personalise this moment, it鈥檚 hard not to. The unprecedented challenges of 2016 have been faced, by common accord, by the one being unsuited, and the other unfit, for the offices they hold. In another age, interventions by a foreign head of even a friendly government in another country鈥檚 domestic affairs would widely be regarded as intolerable. It is a measure of our age and Britain鈥檚 predicament that tolerated they will be. , Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary British History, This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . 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