Hi, welcome to To the Point. I'm Orinalmi. On the cover of a recent Economist magazine, President Trump and Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson are Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle D. The world's two leading democracies are paralyzed over crises of leadership. In Britain, it's the consequence of an

ill-considered referendum three years ago on membership in the European Union. In the U.S.,

it's hyper-partisanship brought to a head by the unlikely presidency of Donald Trump.

Ed Luce is familiar with what's happening on both sides of the Atlantic. He's former

Washington Bureau Chief, now U.S. National Editor for the Financial Times, and he's author of a book

titled The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Welcome, Ed Luce. Great to be here, Warren.

That's a very challenging and interesting title, and let me ask you in that context,

are Donald Trump and Boris Johnson the authors of their own predicaments, or are they victims or scapegoats?

They're certainly authors of their own predicaments.

They're also products of all of our larger predicament in that there's,

you know, a declining trust in politics that they've exploited for their own purposes.

They are, I think, a cure worse than the disease. And to some degree now, with extraordinary

sort of affinity and coincidence of timing, you're seeing both

of them facing probably the crisis of their careers. I mean, Boris Johnson's case is a little

different. I'm more sort of aligning Brexit with Trump, but Boris Johnson's only been prime minister

for 10 or so weeks. At the time

when he became prime minister, I thought he'll be private minister for 10 weeks or 10 years. And I really

don't know which it's going to be. But I do know that Brexit is at a point where, as Boris put it himself, it's do or die. It's probably going to be both

do and die. I think Britain's going to go over the cliff. It's going to have its Selma and Louise

moment. We're going to see an extraordinary crisis in British politics deepen in the coming weeks.

In the United States, of course, we've got the prospect of not only impeachment,

but then, of course, the trial in the Senate and the ultimate test of the career of many Republican senators, whether they see a larger duty

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