A friend in the Gong, a discerning gentleman of exquisite taste, posed the question "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?", and immediately answered it with this article by Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England:
"A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?'
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set."
P.S. Mind you, linguistically, it's always been right there in front of us:
SPOILER ALERT! It is now common knowledge (hat tip to the Internet) that President Donald Trump’s ancestral family name was Drumpf, a presumably respectable German surname that sounds, unfortunately — to English speakers’ ears, at any rate — like a sack of potatoes hitting the bed of a donkey cart.
At some point (a century, or two, or perhaps three ago; the exact timing of it remains unclear), a forebear shortened the family name to Trump: "a good move," Donald Trump noted in 2004, "since Drumpf Tower doesn’t sound nearly as catchy."
During the early months of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015, naysayers deployed Drumpf to great effect as a put-down, sometimes even alleging (falsely) that Drumpf, not Trump, was the candidate’s real name.
It was around the same time that Trump antagonists caught on to another peculiarity of the President-to-be’s surname, which is that it can be passed off as the root of the English noun trumpery, which has been in use since the 1400s and is rife with derogatory connotations. You can imagine these people’s delight to discover, for example, that the current edition of Merriam-Webster defines trumpery as "worthless nonsense," or a collection of "trivial but useless articles" - and that's just for starters.
