Nothing says the ‘special relationship’ is over like this picture of Donald Trump and Liz Truss | Zoe Williams
It’s awkward, nobody seems to know what is going on, and the president’s thumb is at half-mast. It’s almost a metaphor for diplomatic relations between the US and the UK, writes Zoe Williams
When Liz Truss tweeted a photo of herself standing next to Donald Trump, she captioned it “right about everything”. All that effort, all that security clearance and long-haul travel and whatnot, to reach the pinnacle of proximity to your spiritual leader, and that’s the best she could come up with? It was bafflingly lame. And yet the least confusing thing about this scene were the words.
What exactly is going on in this photo? Truss clearly knows where she is, because she’s grinning with a kind of victorious serenity, as if she’s finally achieved the plaudit she knew all along was hers. At the same time – not wishing to be unsisterly – she doesn’t appear to have brushed her hair, so it doesn’t feel like this photo opportunity was in anyone’s diary. It looks like a selfie you’d catch when you run into your favourite contestant from The Traitors on your way through an airport. No time to worry about your grooming; it’s the chance of a lifetime, every second counts.
Trump, meanwhile, looks absolutely mystified. He seems to somehow know he’s meant to smile, but is forcing it so hard it’s rippling down his neck without ever reaching his eyes. His thumb is at half-mast, more like a twitch, a muscle memory, than a signal of enthusiasm. It’s anyone’s guess whether he knows who she is, or why they’re together. Nothing whatsoever about this picture says “leaders on the world stage”, which is fine, because Truss isn’t one. But if she’s not there in a political capacity, how did she finagle the access? Did she just have to drop 50 grand on a plate at a fundraising breakfast?
You could stare at this image for ever without figuring out who knows what about how they came to be here and why, but one thing you can pick up immediately: the special relationship, wherein the US apparently loved the UK more than any other European nation, and we reciprocated by loving the US more than we had any business doing, and we talked about it all the time and they talked about it a lot less … that special relationship? It’s over. It would have been better if we’d ended things on grounds of principle, rather than waiting for America to humiliate us by stepping out with our nemesis, but lickspittle dogs don’t always get to choose how relationships end, not even special ones.
To recap on Truss’s place in British politics: she was prime minister for only 49 days, which on its own would tell a story of total disaster and ignominy, even without all the havoc she wreaked on the economy and people’s mortgages. So much more than a failed political and economic experiment, she’s a figure of ridicule, lampooned for her shorter-than-a-lettuce shelf life by even the rightwing print media that enabled her lamentable rise.
And all that is before she started talking. When she launched her YouTube show in December, the chaos-in-a-cupboard vibe slightly contradicted the immense simplicity of her opinions. London is falling, the UK is falling, the west is falling, all because of the deep state and the elites. Hers is a fervent and paranoid tale of perpetual crisis. It’s quite a familiar “alt-right” playbook, which itself borrows its rhythms from the bubbly hysteria of timeless totalitarianism. And in terms of UK politics, it situates her as very much off the grownups’ table – somewhere between a bad fairy godmother and a shambling heckler. Her long game, we can leave for another day; Donald Trump standing next to her, whether he knows who she is or not, is very much today’s question. What does it say? We’re dumped, guys. Time to face up to it and find a new special relationship.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist