Donald Trump loved Britain. His mum was Scottish. He loved the Queen. He likes the King. And he’s mates with Nigel Farage.

But lately, Trump has turned on Britain. And while I obviously take umbrage with the emerging stances on the Falklands and the union, I also understand how he feels let down by a place he once regarded as his proud ancestral home.

Successive Tory and Labour governments have wrought economic, geopolitical, and demographic carnage on the United Kingdom. As I warned would happen at the time, slippery eel Boris Johnson was too busy with Ukraine and Net Zero to care about anything domestic besides locking people down during COVID. Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham have doubled down on his failed philosophy, adding a humiliating Chagos Islands deal and snubbing Trump’s requests for help against the Islamic Republic of Iran – a conflict I warned against, but that has clearly become the straw that broke the back of the “special relationship.”

“Your country’s in trouble. You’re on the edge of disaster,” Trump said recently. The recurring themes are immigration and energy policy. “You can be a wealthy country or a bankrupt country. You have your choice,” he said in early August.

“Two things are killing Europe. Number one is immigration. Number two is energy.”

– President Donald J. Trump, August 2026.

Net migration, while currently falling, has been wildly out of control for nearly two decades. And don’t let the establishment statisticians fudge the numbers, either. In the year to December 2025, gross 813,000 people immigrated to Britain on a long-term basis. That’s more than the population of a city the size of Leeds – the third largest city in the country. From an infrastructure perspective, it’s impossible. From a cultural, demographic, and religious standpoint, it’s a disaster.

Then there’s energy.

Britain sits next to one of the great energy basins of the developed world and has nevertheless spent years making domestic oil and gas increasingly unattractive to exploit. The headline tax rate on North Sea oil and gas profits reached 78 per cent. Meanwhile, British businesses have been wrestling with some of the developed world’s most expensive electricity.

Trump looks at that and thinks we’re bloody morons. And it’s really, really hard to blame him for thinking that.

Now look at our defence situation.

Britain is a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a founding member of NATO and historically one of the greatest military powers on earth. But real defence spending was allowed to fall 22 per cent between 2009/10 and 2016/17.

Today, the regular British Army numbers just 73,660 personnel, only 66,730 of whom are trade-trained. And while defence spending is back in the headlines and rising slowly, we spent decades collecting a peace dividend and then acted surprised when the world became dangerous again.

It’s also important to consider future technologies like AI and crypto, the latter of which has become a dirty word in Britain, but represents a global £2 trillion industry that we’ve fallen far, far behind on.

Around 12 per cent of British adults now own, or have owned, crypto — up from just four per cent in 2021. We should have been the natural European home of the industry: London already had the financial markets, the lawyers, the capital, the fintech ecosystem, and the timezone.

Instead, our governments have spent years arguing about how to regulate it to death, conflating it with money laundering and Russia hoaxes, instead of seizing the moment. This is such an anti-British mentality it flies in the face of how Britain ever became wealthy in the first instance: speed, ruthlessness, and smarts.

America decided it wanted to compete aggressively for the industry. And it is reaping the rewards. Anyone been to Miami recently? I have. It’s a boomtown like we’ve never seen before. A mega city whose wealth is outgrowing even its capacity to build. Mostly because of people fleeing an oppressive socialism in New York, and investing in emerging technologies and the blockchain.

Britain is still acting like a country managing its decline, rather than one interested in becoming richer and more powerful. So why on Earth should a bullish America feel the need to pander to us, anymore? Is the new world supposed to drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century purely out of nostalgia? Or is Trump right to tell us to buck our ideas up or get left behind. It’s probably the latter, even though many bridle at the mere suggestion.

The OECD says British labour productivity actually FELL 0.7 per cent in 2024. In America it GREW 2.2 per cent.

The OECD expects the British economy to grow just 0.9 per cent this year and specifically identifies weak productivity and high and volatile energy prices among the problems holding us back.

But none of this is really about Trump himself. He’s merely the rather loud man standing outside looking in.

Nor is much of this the fault of the British public, though I will remind those of you who continue to vote Labour and Tory that you’re getting what you voted for. And it’s awful.

Britain’s uniparty inherited one of the richest, most innovative, most powerful countries in human history. A country with oil, gas, world-class universities, global financial markets, nuclear weapons, extraordinary scientific talent, and one of the best geographical positions on earth.

Somehow, they have managed to make Britain expensive to build in, expensive to manufacture in, expensive to employ people in, difficult to invest in, difficult to defend, and increasingly unattractive to its own most productive citizens. Look at the rates of people fleeing. Net migration among British nationals alone was minus 136,000 last year. I’ve long been one of them. Can you blame us?

On too many measures, countries we once patronisingly called “developing” are now moving faster than us.

When Donald Trump looks at what our political class has done to Britain and concludes that the people running the place are bloody morons, well that is almost impossible to argue with, and no national nostalgia or international Trump Derangement Syndrome can fault him.

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