No movie magic in Trump-May moment By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 13, 2018

Opinion

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This article was published 12/07/2018 (2315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This wasn’t what many Britons were hoping for.

What they wanted from their prime minister was an emphatic Love Actually moment, but what they got from Theresa May’s joint press conference Friday alongside U.S. President Donald Trump was a restrained and deferential performance that felt a bit too much like… well, love, actually.

In the Richard Curtis-directed 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually, Hugh Grant portrays a British prime minister who hosts a summit meeting with the American president, played by Billy Bob Thornton. The fictional POTUS turns out to be a vulgar, philandering bully, prompting the prime minister to use their joint press event to deliver an applause-inspiring verbal smackdown.

“I fear this has become a bad relationship — a relationship based on the president taking exactly what he wants, and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain,” the rom-com prime minister offers. “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”

In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s roughshod-running appearance at last week’s NATO summit, British newspapers were awash with headlines imploring May to deliver a real-life version of that memorable onscreen moment.

Trump even provided the British prime minister with an added incentive to serve up a dressing-down, by offering Britain’s Sun newspaper a pre-summit interview in which he criticized May’s handling of the Brexit issue, suggested the current soft approach to the U.K.’s exit from the European Union could jeopardize potential trade deals with the U.S., and offered an off-the-cuff endorsement of Brexit hardliner Boris Johnson as someone who would “make a great prime minister.”

But alas, when it came time for the obligatory media conference, the real British prime minister was unable to muster the confrontational might of her fictional movie counterpart. Instead, what followed was the usual photo-op litany of platitudes and vagaries, spiced up slightly by Trump’s denial that he had criticized May in the earlier interview. True to form, he dismissed the Sun’s reporting as “fake news” (the newspaper immediately posted an audio recording of the interview, proving Trump’s “fake” claim to be bogus).

For her part, May seemed content to let Trump do most of the talking. After opening remarks highlighting the long history of co-operation between the two nations, the British prime minister complimented the U.S. president’s supportive reaction to recent Russian nerve-agent attacks on U.K. soil, spoke positively of U.S.-British trade relations and lauded Trump’s recent dialogue with North Korea.

In the Q-and-A session which followed, May said nothing that either contradicted or criticized Trump.

The closest her remarks came to confrontational was this observation about Trump’s upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin: “What is important is that the president goes into this from a position of strength, as he is doing, as well as a position of unity in NATO.”

Those hoping for a Hollywood-blockbuster ending to the Trump-May encounter were left with not much, actually.

There is one way in which the reality eclipsed the fantasy. In the movie, Thornton’s fictional POTUS assesses U.S.-British relations this way: “Our special relationship is still very special.”

On Friday, Trump managed to one-up that: “I give our relationship, in terms of grade, the highest level of special.”

Roll credits. Fade to black.