Photographer: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As long-time readers may recall, I lived in London from 2012 to 2018, so I missed much of the hysteria surrounding the 2016 presidential election. When my daughter called my wife and me around 4 a.m. (London time) after election day to tell us that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States, we were shocked. (I suspect much of America, and perhaps Trump himself, was shocked, so just count us in the crowd.)

In the days following the election, however, we saw firsthand the reaction of people abroad. We know – we saw it with our own eyes – whether the United States was the laughingstock of the world (or at least of London) before and after Election Day.

My qualification in the previous paragraph – “or at least London” – should make a difference for attentive readers. Politically, England is very similar to the United States: there are liberal big cities and conservative rural areas. We have seen how London, a liberal city, reacted to Trump’s election. We have not seen how the rural areas of England or the rest of the world have reacted.

This is probably significant: London, for example, was stunned when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016. No one in London thought the United Kingdom should secede from Europe; the rest of the country disagreed. The result of the Brexit vote surprised people in the city.

Anyway, my wife and I would occasionally go to the nearby BBC studios to sit in the studio audience and watch a broadcast of Any Questions, a political talk show on BBC 4. The BBC would bring together four panellists from across the British political spectrum – Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrat and perhaps the Greens – and a BBC presenter would ask questions submitted by ten members of the audience (which numbered perhaps 500 or 600 people).

In the days following Trump’s election, every time Trump’s name was mentioned in a question or answer, everyone present laughed. The panellists – from across the British political spectrum – and the audience – a cross-section of the population living in the London area – all laughed.

Big laughter.

Nobody could believe that the Americans were as stupid as they had just proven themselves to be.

As an American, I was appalled by this. I couldn’t shake the thought that America would one day need Britain’s support for something, and that it might be hard to get that support when the whole country was laughing at us.

We weren’t a laughing stock before Trump was elected. We literally became a laughing stock when the election results were announced.

On another night, several months later, my wife and I attended a performance of the play Network. (You may remember the movie, Network, which was a then-current adaptation of the film.) After the cast raised their curtain, a film began to play on the large screen in the center of the stage. It soon became clear that the film was showing the inaugurations—the swearing-in—of every American president from 1976 to the present. (The idea was to bridge the gap between the original broadcast of the film and when we saw the play. The film was about television; while watching the play, one couldn’t help but think of social media, which of course didn’t exist four decades earlier.)

The audience stood and watched as first Carter, then Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton, then Bush II, and finally Obama took the oath of office, and no one left the theater.

Many spectators – the Lyttleton Theatre in London has almost 900 seats – stood and respectfully watched the swearing-in of all the presidents until Trump’s image appeared on the screen. The entire hall immediately erupted in boos.

Once again, as an American, I found myself concerned about our country’s reception in the world.

I understand that isolationist Trump supporters think this is irrelevant: “Why do we care what those lousy Brits think? Who needs them? We’re just talking about a small island in the North Atlantic. America first!”

I’m a little more internationalist, but I understand the point.

But please don’t tell me – as Trump and his gang often do – that without Trump at the helm we would be the laughing stock of the world.

I have experienced and seen this: It is only since Trump took over that we have become the laughing stock of the world.

Mark Herrmann was a partner in a leading international law firm for 17 years and is now Deputy General Counsel of a large international company. He is the author of The cheapskate’s guide to practicing law And Strategy for litigation in the area of ​​product liability for pharmaceuticals and devicesj (Affiliate links). You can reach him by email at (email protected).