In a development that should surprise nobody, Donald Trump has found a way to blame President Obama for Thursday night’s Brexit vote.
Or maybe blame is the wrong word. Trump is happy with the United Kingdom’s decision to bail on the EU, after all. Rather, the Republican candidate seems to think the referendum result proves that Obama is both incompetent and globally despised. Back in April, you see, the president visited 10 Downing St. and delivered a speech urging the British to vote “Remain.” “I was actually very surprised that President Obama were to come over here and he were to be so bold as to tell the people over here what to do,” Trump said during a press conference Friday in Scotland, where he was visiting one of his golf courses. “If he had not said it, I think your result might have been different.”
One could interpret this as a subtle dig at the British electorate. Given that Trump believes the U.K. made a wise choice Thursday night, he is implicitly suggesting that its people would have voted against their own best interests had Obama not clumsily intervened. Insulting as that idea may be, Trump isn’t alone in believing it. Nigel Farage of the the far-right U.K. Independence Party has suggested pretty much the same thing. I’ll leave it up to you whether this makes the theory that Brits cut off their noses in order to spite Obama’s face more credible or less.
Interestingly, Trump isn’t the only American who has tried to lay the Brexit vote at Obama’s feet. Another theory comes to us from columnist and CNN talking head Josh Rogin:
Let us leave aside any arguments about Obama’s handling of Syria. Like Trump’s, this hot take has the advantage of being unverifiable, given that there was no official exit polling Thursday night. Moreover, it sounds at least vaguely plausible: Immigration was a driving force behind the Brexit movement, and some politicians, like Farage, did try to fan fears about refugees. But Britain’s concerns about migrants predate the Syrian crisis, and much of the discussion about immigration during the campaign focused not on Middle Easterners but on the arrival of central Europeans, like the Polish. When the “Leave” campaign wanted to tap into anxieties about Muslims, meanwhile, its go-to move was to fearmonger about Turkey’s possible accession into the EU. Tempting as it is to blame Obama as the root of all the world’s misfortune, Rogin needs to work a little harder to prove it here.
