This was not a good week for democratic institutions in the Anglosphere. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took the extraordinary step of suspending Parliament next month, undermining efforts to prevent Britain from crashing out of the European Union on October 31. Across the Atlantic, two newspapers reported that President Donald Trump had recently floated pardon offers to government officials if they broke the law to help complete his widely opposed border-wall by Election Day.

Such is the nature of government by self-styled right-wing populists. Both men rose to power by promising things that aren’t really feasible. For Trump and his allies, it was a “big, beautiful” wall stretching the length of the southern U.S. border. For Johnson and his gang of Brexiteers, it was a British divorce from the EU in which everybody wins and nobody loses. Whenever lawmakers in either country have attempted to bring the two men back to earth, Trump and Johnson have resorted to undemocratic tactics in order to circumvent and delegitimize them. This isn’t an accident of their approach to governance; it’s the point of it.

It’s hardly new to compare Trump and Johnson. They share a bumbling public affect, a history of racist remarks, and an instantly recognizable hair color. “I don’t know the new prime minister of England,” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Thursday. “He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Trump recently referred to Johnson as the “Britain Trump [sic]” after the latter moved into 10 Downing Street. Johnson once said during the 2016 election that being mistaken for Trump in New York City was “one of the worst moments” he’d ever experienced; he’s since adopted a more favorable tone toward the president.

What defines both leaders is that neither of them actually have a popular mandate to govern. Trump received three million fewer votes than his opponent in the 2016 election, a fact that seems to constantly gnaw at him. Only a quirk of America’s democratic system—namely, that the Electoral College occasionally hands power to someone who doesn’t receive the most votes—brought him to the Oval Office. Over the past two years, he’s been one of the most consistently unpopular presidents in American history. Last year’s midterms saw Democrats retake the House of Representatives by a substantial margin as a direct rebuke to his presidency.

Johnson’s situation is slightly more complex. He won a seat in Parliament in last summer’s general election, where the Conservative Party also won the most seats overall in the House of Commons. But the British electorate did not vote for a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson; they voted for one led by Theresa May, who stepped down over the summer after a humiliating series of defeats in Parliament over her Brexit agreement with the European Union. Johnson then won the race to succeed her as Conservative party leader, thus making him the prime minister. What a system.