Trump et Boris

—  You Utter Berk

The Trump phenomenon spreads to Old Blighty A Boris Sampler Mayor Boris Johnson presides over London, and he’s a member of Parliament, too, and he’s determined to preserve what’s left of the mighty Britain that once made tyrants tremble and despots squeak. Lately it’s the English, like the rest of Europe, who squeak under the lash of unelected bureaucrats who preside over the continent from Brussels. Mr. Johnson, like the Donald, is a native New Yorker, “born in England,” he might say, “while my mother was temporarily in New York.” Indeed, the mayor and The Donald are not personally alike at all and it’s difficult to compare American and British politics, but they share a skepticism — if not contempt — for the ruling elites who connive in whittling down the greatest experiments of government in history. But what they do share, whether the Oxford-educated mayor admits it or not, is an eagerness to take on the passivity and platitudes of the elites who are afraid to confront the mortal threat to the consent of the governed, the example that England once held up to the world, the example followed by the colonies planted in the new world. “The big battalions of the argument [over Britain leaving the EU] are unquestionably ranged against people like me,” the mayor says. “We are portrayed as crazy, cracked and all the rest of it. I don’t mind. I happen to think that I am right. It is a very, very difficult case to make. I have thought an awful lot about it. I have thought about it for many years.” It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump talking that way about his journey in politics. Leaving the Union, as Mr. Johnson put it in the column he regularly writes for the London Daily Telegraph, “is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change in Britain’s relations with Europe. This is the only opportunity we will ever have to show that we care about self-rule. A vote to Remain [in the European Union] will be taken in Brussels as a green light for more [control] and for the erosion of democracy.”  [Full] Since Boris Johnson was born in New York City, it would seem that he qualifies to be President of the United States, which very thought  I find orgasmic.