Brexit Isn’t What’s Dragging Britain Down

In countless American minds, Brexit and President Donald Trump are linked, and not in a good way.The term Brexit is shorthand for “British exit.” The vote of more than 17 million U.K. citizens on a referendum to leave the European Union and Trump’s shock election to the presidency both happened in the same year, 2016. The two events have come to be seen as part of the same demotic wave, pushing against the established international order, which has come to be called populism.Different issues were at play at those ballot queues, several months and an ocean apart. Trump collapsed all of the issues when he went to Scotland for a golf course opening not long after the vote.Trump, still a private citizen, said in a press conference that U.K. voters had “taken back their independence,” and he saw a “big parallel” brewing in other nations. “Not only the United States, but [in] other countries, people want to take their country back,” he said. He also called himself “Mr. Brexit,” because he knew a popular bandwagon when he saw one.Because of the association, one way to root against Trump has been to highlight any failures of Brexit and to pin those failures on populist notions of independence and self-determination. For instance, The Atlantic magazine both features Trump skepticism as a part of its business model and blames Brexit for the United Kingdom’s decline.