The National:

DONALD Trump has thanked Boris Johnson for saying that the US president is “making America great again”, three years after Johnson made the claim.

Trump was responding to a Telegraph article about leaked details of meetings between top US and UK diplomats which happened in 2017.

What Trump presumably doesn’t realise is that the piece is about how Johnson groomed the US president into fighting his corner, despite never really being ideologically aligned with him.

The article also describes the incumbent US president as a “bully” and a “mansplainer”.

In the US notes reported in the article, Johnson is said to have told Woody Johnson, the then newly appointed US ambassador to the UK, that: “The president is making America great again.”

Responding to a tweet from Larry Schweikart, the right-wing author of such classics as A Patriot's History of the United States and 48 Liberal Lies About American History, Trump wrote: “Thank you Boris, working great together!”

Schweikart’s tweet, which Trump shared, said: “Exclusive: Leaked meeting notes show Boris Johnson said Trump was 'making America great again'”

However, Trump (and Schweikart for that matter) doesn’t appear to have actually read the article in question which, written by Ben Riley-Smith for the Telegraph, runs to nearly 4000 words.

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This is hardly surprising for a president who has been described as “semi-literate”. Michael Wolff wrote in his damning book Fire and Fury: “He [Trump] didn’t process information in any conventional sense.

“He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.”

Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn as saying: “It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing.”

Not only is Trump described as a “bully” and a “mansplainer”, it outlines how he proudly name-dropped the “incredible” Cohn, the same man who said it was awful that the president doesn’t read.

Though the article does quote Johnson as saying, in August 2017, that Trump “is increasingly popular in the UK”, it also points out that a YouGov poll the week before found just 16 per cent of Brits held a favourable view of the US president.

There’s a lot of bad in those 4000 words for Trump.

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He is made to look more than a little clueless on foreign affairs, as it relates how he asked Theresa May: “What about Northern Ireland?

“There’s such hatred there. I just don’t understand where it comes from."

He also doesn’t exactly come across as presidential when he told May he “would rather follow than lead” after she asked for his leadership in a diplomatic dispute with Russia.

May apparently frequently rolled her eyes while on phone calls with Trump, who would go on long rant-like monologues about different topics, monologues described by one witness as “hectoring” and “relentless”.

The article wraps up by saying Johnson “‘is not Steve Bannon or a Trump ideologist,’ one well-placed UK source said. ‘But … [the White House] believed he was part of their grand world view’.

“It is a belief still held in the White House to this day.”