While thousands of people gathered around the UK on Monday night to protest against Donald Trump’s travel ban, a handful of people appeared to be making efforts to actually support the US president.
Firstly there was this, spotted in central Cardiff:
For comparison, here’s what the anti-ban demonstration looked like just streets away:
As it turns out, even the ‘pro-Trump protest’ wasn’t actually pro-Trump at all, in fact it was a social experiment conducted by two vloggers known as Safe Vlogs and Man Like Sanaan.
They explained on the Safe Vlogs YouTube channel that the stunt was “to instigate an organic reaction, to verify whether they act upon their beliefs and we managed to capture some truly remarkable displays of ones passion in belief and the length people would go to stand by what they believe in”.
As their video showed, it might be some time before we see any actual demonstrations in favour of the newly minted US president, considering the exceptionally negative response they received while posing as supporters.
For those who didn’t fancy taking to the streets to demonstrate their support for Trump, there were also some petitions to sign.
One on the Parliamentary petitions site, urging people to show their support for allowing the billionaire businessman into the UK, had managed to gather 95,000 signatures at the time of writing.
But a similar petition on Change.org, started by Alan Henderson, had rather less support.
It explained: “Donald Trumps [sic] scheduled State Visit to the United Kingdom shouldn’t be blocked simply due to others disagreeing with his views, this isn’t how democracy works.
“Please sign the petition to show Donald Trump he’s welcome within the UK.”
On Tuesday morning the petition had 80 signatures.
Meanwhile, a petition calling for Trump’s visit to be blocked is currently the second most popular petition to Parliament ever. More than 1.6 million people had signed it by Tuesday morning.
In a letter to The Times published on Tuesday, a former head of the Foreign Office said that Theresa May’s decision to invite Trump for a state visit has put the Queen in a “very difficult position”.
Lord Ricketts warned that the invitation was “premature” and pointed out that it was unprecedented for US presidents to be invited during their first year in the White House.
He questioned whether Trump was “specially deserving of this exceptional honour”.