LONDON — During the Vietnam War the American ambassador in Saigon, Frederick Nolting Jr., indignant at negative coverage, demanded of the French journalist François Sully, “Why, Monsieur Sully, do you always see the hole in the doughnut?”

“Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” Sully replied, “there is a hole in the doughnut.”

Speaking of doughnuts, Boris Johnson may well become the British prime minister this month. The United States and Britain would then be led by men with striking similarities, and not just on the hair front: two charlatans and narcissists with flimsy notions of the truth, utterly unprincipled, given to racist slurs, skilled practitioners of the politics of spectacle, manipulators of fear, nationalist traffickers in an imaginary past of radiant greatness, fabulists of reborn glory, with giant holes at their centers where conscience and integrity went missing.

So much for the leadership of the free world!

One of the great satisfactions of my life was watching Britain take its place in Europe, prejudice fall away, gastronomy and England find an unlikely accommodation and tolerance spread — until in 2016, Britain, in a radical act of self-harm, hurled itself over a cliff called Brexit. Little Englandism had reasserted itself. Johnson bobbed up to incarnate it, demonstrating the inexhaustible English fascination with the jolly good pranks of the pampered public schoolboy.

Now, if he gets his way, Johnson is going to be in our faces, like his buddy President Trump. The Tories have become a one-issue party — Brexit — just as the Republicans have become a one-man party — Trump. Each in folding has shown all the spine of a jellyfish.

Johnson, if picked by Tories, will serve up his take on Trump’s “phenomenal” and “amazing” (with possible Oxbridge additions). He will be bent on getting Britain out of the European Union by the latest deadline, Oct. 31 — and to heck with the consequences.

This is ominous. The most dangerous attitude toward truth is contempt for its importance. The most dangerous use of language is one that strips it of meaning. The most dangerous approach to the past is the attempt to mythologize it. Trump and Johnson don’t care.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day — or as they say in Alabama and elsewhere, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. The Atlantic Alliance of Trump and Johnson is like that these days. It stumbles along, not without occasional use, but stripped of its core.

When it comes to the West as a moral rather than a mere geographical expression, the Trump administration has gone AWOL. The West stands for nothing. Or, at most, it stands for the threat of tariffs.

How did this happen? How did two nations of laws dedicated to individual liberty come around to the semiotics of Trump: It’s O.K. to stiff people; it’s O.K. to lie; it’s O.K. to wink at racism?

The answer lies in the Six I’s: Inequality, impunity, invisibility, immigration, inversion and the internet.

Inequality that has risen as workers in the bottom 60 percent of American society have seen no real wage increase since 1980 while the richest 1 percent now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Impunity that allowed the designers of the financial weapons of mass destruction that bankrupted many millions of people in 2008 to walk away. To conclude that the system was rigged was then only logical.

Invisibility that gave many citizens living far from the wired metropolises at the nexus of globalization the impression that they counted for nothing, as their hospitals died, public transport disappeared, their schools closed and their jobs went elsewhere.

Immigration that, in both Europe and the United States, brought millions of undocumented migrants to the borders without these societies showing the capacity to agree on a policy that was humane, firm and clear — and, in the American case, that reconciled the demands of a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.

Inversion of the values of what had been white-male-dominated societies, giving rise to culture wars ranging across the charged questions of race, gender and identity, with cities and the hinterland often at violent odds.

The internet that, through social media, destroyed traditional mediators of society, like established political parties, and empowered politics of the mob. What counts today is not persuasion but mobilization.

Here was the grist for Trump’s populism — and that of his acolytes across the West. Here were the sources of anger and fear that could be exploited. Here’s “the American carnage” he could leverage. Here’s why, in the name of America First nationalism, he went about trashing the multilateral postwar order America had forged. Here’s why he tweets not only of a second term but of staying in power beyond that if the masses demand it. Trump’s inner despot is like Dr. Strangelove’s arm: He can’t keep it down.

Like Johnson, Trump is not an “aberration,” as Joe Biden has suggested. He’s a symptom. He won’t go away absent treatment of the symptoms. That won’t be easy, but it’s doable because Trump’s doughnut not only has a big hole in it; it’s rotten to the core.

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Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. @NYTimesCohen

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