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‘As we watch this story unfold, there is already a tendency to count down the days until the 2028 election and assume all will return to normal when Trump leaves office, as it appeared to when Biden won in 2020.’
YouGov, on behalf of Best for Britain, have just completed a comprehensive survey [ [link removed] ] of public attitudes towards the UK’s main trading partners, including the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). The results are striking - one in particular. Public trust in the US, as measured by the difference between the proportion of respondents saying they trust the country and those saying they distrust it, has fallen by 25 percentage points [ [link removed] ] between November 2024 and September 2025. British voters now, by a significant margin, see the EU as the UK’s most reliable partner.
What this might mean for the future trajectory of the UK/EU relationship is an interesting question, well worth some analysis: but that’s for another article. The focus here is on what this collapse of trust means for the future of UK/US relations - the fabled “special relationship”. And the starting point has to be - why such a dramatic change in just ten months?
Part of the answer must be about the unique style and tone of Trump’s second term. Having been in Washington for much of Trump’s first term, I’m struck by how different Trump 2.0 looks. Firstly, he won a significantly bigger victory. In 2016, he won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by some three million ballots; and the election was tainted by evidence, confirmed by the CIA [ [link removed] ], of significant Russian interference. In 2024, he won the popular vote by two million ballots - and actually did better in every state and every demographic than in 2016. Hence the striking self-confidence. As he himself puts it so elegantly: “Everyone’s kissing my ass now.” In 2017, many of his White House team didn’t really support his agenda, but in 2025 he has a team of loyalists, enablers and cheerleaders around him. Adding to this, he has an almost entirely compliant Republican Party behind him, the Trump Party in all but name; a Supreme Court that leans heavily right; a business community that has largely fallen into line; and an almost silent Democratic Party, still licking its wounds.
Moreover, this is almost certainly Trump’s final term. He is a man in a hurry, preparing his place in the history books. He asserts that he has been chosen, saved by God from those assassination attempts so that he could save America. We are seeing Trump Unleashed: no filters, no guardrails, and the belief that the usual rules - the checks and balances, the decisions of judges and courts - don’t apply to him. As Edward Luce of the Financial Times [ [link removed] ] put it recently: “From today’s vantage point, Trump’s first term looks like a model of constitutional restraint.”
All of which has translated into the frenzied blur of activity that has marked these first ten months. But it is activity the likes of which we’ve not seen before. ICE agents break into peoples’ houses, force their way into schools and arrest people on the streets. Cheered on by the President [ [link removed] ], the Department of Justice goes after members of the establishment: former heads of security agencies, serving Democrat politicians, and retired generals. The National Guard are deployed in several US cities, including the capital. To many British onlookers, it must look shocking, even terrifying: an America we don’t recognise.
Then, alongside this new and ominously unfamiliar America, there are Trump’s tariffs, and his attitude towards NATO. On the former, Prime Minister Keir Starmer would claim, with justification, that he and his team have negotiated the best trade deal with the US of anyone. But it is still damage limitation. There is a baseline US 10% tariff on most UK exports, plus 25% tariffs on exports of steel, aluminium and cars above defined quotas. And there may still be more to come, such as on pharmaceuticals. All of this is against World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. There is no trade imbalance justification - according to US figures they run a trade surplus with us. It must seem bitingly unfair to a recently elected British Government searching desperately for growth.
As for NATO, Trump’s demands that Europe spends more on defence are of course legitimate. Sheltering under the American defence umbrella, we have been lunching for free for decades. And Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has been a brutal reminder of the reality of our neighbourhood. But the new NATO collective commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defence and defence related expenditure by 2035 is going to be immensely hard for European governments to meet. Meanwhile, Trump continues to hint that, absent a breakthrough soon on a ceasefire, he will walk away from the Ukraine war and leave Europe to shoulder the full burden of supporting Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion.
Put all of this together and some might ask why trust in the US has only fallen 25 points. But there is another side to Trump, exemplified by his success in forcing Netanyahu into a ceasefire in Gaza. He is prepared to use American power in ways that we’ve not seen before, which may lead him to achieve things in the rest of his time in office which surprise us all. We can but hope.
Finally, as we watch this story unfold, there is already a tendency to count down the days until the 2028 election and assume all will return to normal when Trump leaves office, as it appeared to when Biden won in 2020. Remember “America is back”. But will normality return? I’m doubtful. I think the 2028 Republican field will be dominated by the MAGA crowd, led by J.D. Vance with his tech-bro backers. I think the Democrats will have a civil war between ultra-progressive, and probably unelectable, candidates, versus centrists who will try to win over the Trump base by adopting some of the hard-edged nationalism of tariffs and America First. Remember how New Labour appeared to start from an acceptance of some of the principles of Thatcherism? Will Trumpism leave a similar permanent mark on America?
Lord Darroch is a former UK National Security Advisor and former British Ambassador to the United States.
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