The hat’s the thing.
For Britons struggling to grasp Donald Trump’s hold on a certain section of American voters, the U.K. ambassador to the U.S. offered this explanation in a Sunday interview with the Guardian:
“It is not accidental that on the front of his baseball cap it says, ‘Make America great again’,” Sir Peter Westmacott told the British paper. “For whatever reason, there are people who feel America is not at the moment the world’s dominant power who snaps its fingers and the rest of the world falls into place.”
The ambassador also attributed Trump’s rise to class “anger” over the wage gap and a stagnant economic recovery.
“The rich are very rich and there is a sense that the people at the bottom are being funded by hard-working families paying too high a level of tax,” he said. “But I think it’s also that people are not feeling any better off than they were.”
And then there is the question of political correctness.
“There are a lot of people who love seeing Donald Trump say stuff which nobody else is saying,” said Westmacott, who has also served as Britain’s chief diplomat in France and Turkey.
So does he believe it? How does the ambassador, who grew up in a country constantly fretting over its place in the global pecking order, perceive the U.S. and its own anxieties?
“I don’t think this is a country which is in decline at all.”