LONDON—The United States’ cultural dominance isn’t always benign. The election of Donald Trump told trashy politicians across the world that they could lie continuously, tear up conventions, smash up their countries, and—far from being punished by their electorates—they would win.
Shakespeare’s Richard III complains he must “clothe my naked villainy” and “seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” Trump taught leaders from Brazil to Hungary they no longer needed to pretend to be saintly. However basely they behaved, their base would applaud them. No one learned the lesson better than Britain’s Boris Johnson.
