US president Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

“I think Brexit is very good for the UK, it is going to be very good for UK,” he told the Financial Times last month. “I would have thought when it happened that more would follow, but I really think the European Union is getting their act together. It could be a very good thing for both.”

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Back during his earliest days in office, Trump praised Brexit.

Arriving in Ayrshire to officially open the Trump Turnberry golf resort in January, Trump told BBC News that the Brexit vote was “a fantastic thing.”

“You see it all over Europe and many other cases where they want to take their borders back. They want to take their monetary [sic] back. They want to take a lot of things back. They want to have a country again. I think you are going to have this more and more. I really believe that. And it is happening in the United States,” he added.

In March, White House press secretary Sean Spicer went so far as to declare that Trump was “a leader in the effort to call for Brexit.”


Later that month, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, told the Trump administration to stop expressing such enthusiasm for Brexit.

“I told the vice-president [Mike Pence], ‘Do not say that, do not invite others to leave, because if the European Union collapses, you will have a new war in the western Balkans,” Juncker said.

Trump recently distanced himself from previous comments he made suggesting that other countries would follow the UK example and abandon the EU.

“I would have thought when it [the Brexit vote] happened that more would follow, but I really think the European Union is getting their act together,” he said last month.

“If you would have asked me that the day after the election… I would have said, ‘Yeah, it [the EU] will start to come apart’. But they have done a very good job and — I am meeting with them very soon — they have done a very good job in bringing it back together,” he added.

According to Verdict‘s Brexit sentiment tracker, business confidence in the UK remains high despite warnings from ministers and economists before the vote to leave the EU.