Trump Interpretation of British Vote: They took their country back.

Britain votes to Leave the EU

Peter Sage Introduction of a Guest Post

At 4:00 a.m. Pacific Time I watched Donald Trump in a live press conference at the opening of a golf course and hotel in Scotland.   He was at ease and confident.  He defined the British vote as simply a matter of the British wanting to take their country back.  They want borders, Trump said.  They want to control migration.  They want to make their own deals.

Trump in Scotland

The people themselves should decide the direction of their country and I am with the people, he said.    He said it was a forecast of what was happening in America.

He was matter of fact and he did not criticize anyone, except Obama for having stuck his nose into British politics.  He reassured the British that they were still and always a great ally and nothing would change if he were president.   He looked presidential: calm and reassuring.   The British pound fell 10% overnight and Trump said, yes, there might be some short term disruption but the lower valued pound would probably be good for Britain, making their exports more competitive and their tourist industry more attractive.   He was defining the turmoil in the financial markets as "no big deal", not a big deal to be managed.   

I was up early.   Meanwhile some of my readers, living in an Asian time zone, were up responding immediately to the British vote.  Thad Guyer, an attorney specializing in representing employee whistleblowers, had this guest post suggestion waiting this morning in my in-box.

Thad Guyer

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:

Border Defenders Vote Down Liberal Parties Across Europe—Is Hillary Next?

The “Unthinkable” a year ago came to a final tally at about 1:14 a.m. EST this morning.  Citizen border defenders of the most powerful country in Europe decided they had reached the “breaking point” of uncontrolled immigration and seceded from the European Union (EU).  The EU had threatened the UK’s lesser educated working class whites to either tolerate mass migration or suffer the consequences. Liberal and conservative British politicians alike had urged the border defenders to submit to the EU. To mollify them, if not to shame them by a majority vote of their countrymen, Prime Minister David Cameron and his party put mass migration vs. globalist economic prosperity up for a vote.  The multi-partisan “xenophobic”, “Islamophobic”, “under-educated”, “rural”, “blue collar”, “anti-immigrant”, “white nationalist” border defenders, were threatened that should they, by some fluke, win such a referendum, economic curses and catastrophes would befall them, their children and grandchildren.

Then a strange thing happened.  Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a newcomer to “mainstream politics” in 2013 (see Wikipedia https://goo.gl/hokeRL), appealed to these white border defenders to join with him in an organized “Leave” campaign of “Eurosceptics”.  Their message to the EU in Brussels was clear:  “If our choice is to suffer an immigrant invasion across the English Channel, or to secede from the EU and live in less affluent British Isles—a ‘fortress Britain’—then we choose secession”. 

One of many British groups advocating against immigration 

Something even stranger still happened.  Boris Johnson, one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s most popular colleagues in the Conservative Party, announced that he was breaking with party ideology to help UKIP leader Farage promote the “Leave” campaign. (See, Wikipeadia, https://goo.gl/AOg589).  Cameron tried rhetorically to sound more sympathetic to the border defenders, but his party elites, and social justice warriors, could not help themselves from joining Liberals to ridicule these white working class families as “racists” and “xenophobes”.  Once “Boris”, who is an ultra-urbanite from London, joined the “Leave” side, it began attracting urban, exurban, center-left, and even just enough legal immigrant support.   BBC and NPR made special efforts to interview brown and yellow skinned Leave supporters, only to hear the same message about mass migration—enough is enough.  

Cameron even got Barrack Obama to make a cameo appearance denouncing the Leave campaign, since the President had a readied arsenal of insults for our own white border defenders, whom Obama dismisses as crude white losers.  They are brainwashed by “cable news stations, on right-wing radio, it's pumped into cars, and bars, and VFW halls all across America”, said the President denigrating the Veterans of Foreign Wars.  (See Fox News, “VFW Fires Back at Obama”, http://goo.gl/SYgkXL).  Boris was happy to give Obama a smack-down in the British media, similar to that of another ultra-urbanite, Donald Trump. Indeed, as the polls showed growing support for Leave, the establishment on both the left and right threw everything they had at Boris, including frequent “Trump” and “Hitler” comparisons. 

Mainstream British media, most notably the BBC, joined in not just denouncing the border defenders, but in censoring virtually all news about migrant crimes and the violent riots in camps in France, Greece and Italy during the month before yesterday’s vote.  This just drove the border defenders to alternative media, including Brietbart UK.

Nothing worked. 

By a majority of 52% to 48%, the political toll of uncontrolled mass migration was inflicted on the whole of Europe, if not on all Western economies.  Angela Merkel, who loves the EU and has used it to project Germany’s power in unprecedented ways since World War II, would do it differently if she could now.  She would have paid the $3 billion she paid to Turkey much sooner to cut off the migrant flow-- had she known her “humanitarianism” would so dramatically damage the foundations of collective European democracy that makes such humanitarianism possible.  Prime Minister David Cameron, who will soon resign or be removed, would also do it differently now if he could.

Federal government losing control

Hillary Clinton is facing a strikingly analogous historical and global set of circumstances, political parties and personalities, and policy choices over mass migration to America.  Orlando last week, and the Supreme Court decision yesterday affirming the illegality of Obama’s Merkel-like unilateral power grab in mass migration policy, have laid dry tinder for a political conflagration of the Democratic Party, and of a Supreme Court that will either expand, or limit, the rights of future generations.  

I hope Hillary does not join Merkel and Cameron in wishing she would have handled the mass migration issue differently.