Donald Trump is the epitome of the politics of self-harm

There is no longer any question as to Donald Trump possibly growing into his role as America’s president. He has not, and will not, that much has long since been evident. Trump has ruined any chance he has of “Making America Great Again”.

READ MORE: Trump criticises May before landing in UK, saying ‘Brexit is Brexit’

Along the way, in a monumental and scarcely believable orgy of political self-harm, he has squandered nearly every opportunity to win friends and influencing people, unless, of course, you happen to be Vladimir Putin.

READ MORE: Trump accused of being 'determined to insult' PM on UK visit

Anyone who doubts Trump’s capacity for political self-harm need look no further than this week’s Nato summit. Not content with haranguing alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg over the breakfast croissants on Wednesday, he went on to berate Germany and chancellor Angela Merkel over what he sees as their “subservience” to Russia.

No wonder Merkel made the observation after the G7 summit in May, that the era in which “we could rely on others is over”. Europe needs to “take our fate into our own hands,” the German leader rightly warned over Washington’s shifting stance.

Merkel recognised then, as others have too, that Trump is the epitome of the self-harming politics that bedevil our times. In his skewed world view, disorder is the order of the day as allies are treated as enemies and enemies as allies.

His is a strategy underpinned by a perverse logic. It’s one that runs along the lines of, “if I can hurt you, you will be forced to make concessions”. For Trump the world and its institutions, agreements, treaties and alliances are just one big piece of real estate. He has no

concept that in the diplomatic arena, you simply cannot apply the same rules and to hell with the consequences.

His is a brutish approach. It’s one that doesn’t work in diplomacy or global politics and almost invariably results in the kind of blowback that is ultimately harmful to his country and its interests.

Time and again since his election, Trump’s decisions and policies have worked to alter America and to change, and potentially undermine, many of the relatively solid geopolitical arrangements that have structured international politics since the end of the Second World War. He has embraced isolationism and, in general, policies that have proved to be self-destructive for the US, both domestically and internationally.

All this is bad enough for those American citizens who refused to endorse his presidency and have grown to loathe him, but Trump’s car-crash policies have a habit of impacting on just about anyone wherever he goes.

Just watch as this week fresh from his fierce row with American allies at Nato, Trump’s malign influence is brought to bear on that other compulsive group of political self-harmers, Prime Minister Theresa May and the Tory Government.

Barely had he set foot on UK soil yesterday than Trump was questioning May’s Brexit strategy, asking if what Brexiteers had voted for was actually being delivered.

In Trump’s defence, some might of course argue that at least he is challenging May’s strategy, more than can be said for Jeremy Corbyn and much of the Labour opposition right now.

As Trump moves around the UK on his two-day visit stirring up trouble for him and others it might be tempting to see him as a lonely isolated figure. Nothing though could be further from the truth.

Quietly and largely unnoticed, a cadre of Trump’s supporters, leaders from Europe’s populist movement, have been holding their own little get-together in a five-star hotel in London’s Mayfair.

Among others in this toxic band are Louis Aliot, a right-wing French politician and boyfriend of the French populist firebrand Marine Le Pen; Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of a prominent London conservative think tank; and, of course, the ubiquitous Nigel Farage.

Head honcho at the meeting is Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who in a brief interview with Politico magazine, said they had come together to help “contextualise Trump” for a European audience.

To put this in real terms, it means they are hell bent on doing all they can to promote Trumpist policies alongside the president’s UK visit.

But if Trump’s visit is characterised by the chaos and acrimony that usually travels in tandem with him, then he will find more than enough of that bitterness already exists in UK politics here right now. Like Trump, Theresa May and her Tory Government have become political self-harmers par excellence.

As the British political journalist Mehdi Hasan pointed out in the online magazine The Intercept this week, both the Brexit vote and, less than six months later, the presidential election of Donald Trump, were “unparalleled and unprecedented acts of political, social and economic self-harm”.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the current Brexit debacle is seeing Tory architects such as Boris Johnson jumping ship, having holed the UK below the waterline.

On a national scale, Johnson has helped do what his fellow all-male Oxford dining club pals did as part of the Bullingdon Club when they smashed up restaurants before swanning off and leaving others to pick up the tab and clear up the mess.

Watching all this from Scotland, we have to be wise to these prevailing self-harming politics of our times. First and foremost we must not fall foul of such behaviour ourselves by looking for enemies within our own political ranks where there are none.

Unlike Trump and May, we need to recognise our European allies for being just that, allies, and do all we can to reinforce that bond in the face of Tory determination to do the suicidal opposite.

There is no doubt that during his fortunately brief UK visit, Donald Trump will find himself in good company among Tory political self-harmers and Brexiteers. He is welcome to them. Scotland on the other hand needs to get shot of the lot of them as soon as it can.