Donald Trump and Theresa May: An Odd Couple
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Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain will meet President Trump on Friday in Washington for what could be an episode of “The Odd Couple”: The Stiff Headmistress meets the Great Salesman.
Reserved, slightly awkward and serious, Mrs. May does not even have a Twitter account and does her best to remain silent on the key issues of the day, putting her head above water only when she must.
Normally, American presidents go on to British leaders about “the special relationship” with a sort of patronizing politeness. But Mr. Trump has already put Mrs. May’s teeth on edge with his cheerful support for a British withdrawal from the European Union, commonly known as Brexit, which she opposed but must carry out.
She has not appreciated his warm relationship with those like Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party, who despises Mrs. May’s Conservative Party and who Mr. Trump has suggested would make a fine ambassador to the United States.
Still, with Britain planning to leave the European Union in two years or so, Mrs. May needs to show Britons they have big friends out in the world beyond Europe, and the United States is already Britain’s single largest trading partner, not counting the European Union itself.
Having put such store into being the first foreign leader to meet President Trump — Mr. Farage and Arron Banks, UKIP’s main financial backer, have met him several times since the election — Mrs. May is determined to put British-American relations on a more traditional track, as a government-to-government partnership.
But hardly one of equals. Mrs. May “is coming as a supplicant and Trump seems to know this,” Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper, said in an interview. On trade, “she’s eager to do a deal, like a house buyer who has already sold her house and has nowhere to live, and Trump, the real estate man, knows that.”
Mrs. May, he said, “is the un-Trump.” Even in “the comparably unglitzy realm of British politics, she is unshowy,” he said. Compared with her predecessor, David Cameron, “she is pretty gray and pallid.” Still, he said, “history shows that personal chemistry does matter.”
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