King Charles III’s recent royal state visit to Washington, DC highlighted the current awkwardness surrounding the special relationship between the US and the UK. In a friendly enough barb, King Charles evoked the French and Indian War: “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French…!" Here he was channeling Trump’s obsession with America’s role in defeating the Nazis in World War Two; indeed, Trump is fond of trotting out the tired trope that Europeans would all be speaking German were it not for the mighty US.

Fittingly, the British-American collaboration in the Second World War is where the term “special relationship” originated, coined by wordsmith and prime minister, Winston Churchill. It aptly describes the friendship and shared interests that have tethered the UK and the US since 1945, particularly in trade, diplomacy, military alliances and, crucially, cultural exchange; think of rock and roll traveling east over the Atlantic to be slung back west with the Beatles and other avatars of the British invasion.

But today, we see this fruitful relationship fraying, possibly even disintegrating. Never in the postwar period has there been such baldfaced disdain emanating from Washington toward the UK and other European social democracies. President Trump’s misleadingly inflammatory rhetoric aside—”I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and …now they want to go to sharia law.”—the administration has put this antagonism into practice by sending State Department officials to meddle in European nations’ internal affairs on behalf of locally maligned far-right parties.

The feeling is mutual: as one British government official, speaking off the record while at a pub and summarizing his cohort’s views, said of the American president: “He’s a fucking cunt.”

As this mutual mistrust and antagonism ratchets up at the highest levels of government, one wonders how it is playing out in the street. Is this political unravelling being accompanied by a cultural unravelling? There is some urgency to this question since, in theory, we are allies who support the democratic form of government. Do Europeans with no political power besides their vote feel a great cultural distancing? And do average Americans feel similarly toward Europe, a feeling that could be exacerbated as the national experience of fighting in Europe recedes from memory to history?

Your humble author, a North Londoner, got an inkling of this mutual cultural disintegration while on a bachelor party trip to Miami. The balmy south Florida evening and torrents of alcohol led me and other British friends to an exceptionally lame open-mic comedy night. Sitting in the front row, I found myself engaging with one bombing comic. He did the thing where he notes cultural differences and then dropped this on me: “Hey, in the UK you guys have Sharia law. At least we can eat bacon!” I was stumped by that one, thinking, fucking hell, are we really not allowed to eat bacon? Has American understanding of British/European culture truly sunk this low?

So I asked around.

There was the lawyer in New York, an American, who is more to the right than he’ll ever know: “Europe is completely irrelevant,” he said dismissively to my question about cultural disintegration. The Iran/America War had recently commenced, and there was diplomatic scrambling across the world from the likes of Russia, China and even Pakistan. “But where is Europe in all this? No where to be seen. It’s completely irrelevant.”

Back in England, I asked a journalist what he thought of the fallout. He sees the potential for recovery, because the ill will really falls on the American president: “British and European sentiment toward the US remains, for the most part, unchanged. Any increased animosity is directed at one man: Donald Trump. I would argue there are probably more Europeans who despise Trump than there are Americans—even those with Democratic-leaning beliefs. He has no redeeming qualities and no class.” He then noted that he did not appreciate Donald Trump’s politics “being transferred over here.”

Polls certainly bear this view out. According to a YouGov poll, while stateside Trump’s approval rating hovers in the upper thirties, in Europe it’s different: 14% approval in the UK and France, 10% in Germany, and a measly 3% in Denmark. Why, after all, would you like an American president who threatens to annex your territory?

Some perspicaciously see the disintegration not in terms of culture but values. One French commentator—who currently lives in Dallas, Texas, offering her a view on both sides of the debate—notes that American values emphasize the individualistic, while in Europe there is a greater sense of collective responsibility. “Climate change is a good example,” she tells me. “When the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement, it was a massive disconnect. And it’s not strictly a political decision. It’s difficult to understand culturally how expectations are so different.”