Standing beside one another in the verdant garden of Chequers, the British prime minister’s countryside retreat, Theresa May and Donald Trump attempted to sell a vision of personal and political harmony. “This incredible woman right here is doing a fantastic job, a great job,” Trump said, announcing that he would back whatever Brexit policy May pursues. It was, of course, a flaccid attempt to undo the damage already committed by the visiting American president, who had just gone unhinged in an interview with The Sun—attacking May’s “soft” Brexit; questioning the viability of a U.K.-U.S. trade deal; declaring that recently departed foreign secretary Boris Johnson would be a “great” prime minister; and denouncing Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, as weak on crime and terrorism. Khan, the man responsible for signing off on the lurid 19-foot baby-Trump balloon currently encircling the capital’s air space, pointedly questioned why he has been the frequent victim of Trump tirades: “It’s for President Trump to explain why he has singled me out for being responsible for these acts of terrorism, and no other mayor or no other leader.” Asked about the interview on Friday morning, as he stood by May, Trump backtracked and dismissed it as “fake news.”

The Sun’s interview landed like a nuclear weapon midway through a black-tie dinner held at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace, to which Trump arrived in a Marine One helicopter before jumping into his menacing-looking limo, the Beast, and drawing up to May and her husband, Philip, who had been waiting in front of assembled guests for six minutes. According to The Washington Post, Trump has been bandying around criticism of May for some months, but when her team was told about the interview, it was believed the coverage would be more positive. Late Thursday night, after dinner, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders spiraled into damage control, releasing a statement at 1:17 A.M., presumably designed to assuage May’s ire and humiliation: “The president likes and respects Prime Minister May very much,” Sanders said. “As he said in his interview with The Sun, she ‘is a very good person’ and he ‘never said anything bad about her.’ He thought she was great on NATO today and is a really terrific person. He is thankful for the wonderful welcome from the prime minister here in the U.K.”

Of course, this is not the first time that Trump and May have muddled through a transatlantic trip together. Back in January 2017, May became the first foreign leader to meet the president, and they were famously photographed holding hands. Despite the widespread mockery that ensued, the trip gave May a unique insight into Trump’s unorthodox style of governance, detailed in a HuffPost piece by Paul Waugh, which recalled one particularly bizarre moment when the president’s then-national security adviser, Mike Flynn, told his boss that other leaders, including Vladimir Putin, had wanted to be the first to visit Trump. “You didn’t tell me that. Why not?” Trump reportedly exclaimed, before embarking on an accusatory tirade while May and her team watched, baffled. “It was jaw-dropping, the whole thing, from beginning to end,” a former insider told Waugh. “He has got no attention span, in fact I thought he had some kind of A.D.H.D. by the time we left. He was all over the place. And his team are so subservient to him, yes sir, no sir. It was pathetic, grown men like [Mike] Pence acting like puppies.”

While May would have been prepared for Trump to throw some curveballs, she probably wasn’t steeled for his unprecedented interjection into British politics, or his praise of Johnson (whose leadership ambitions are well documented), which will be interpreted as an explicit message of support for the Brexiteers currently mutinying over her vision for a quiet divorce from the E.U. The extended version of her so-called “Chequers compromise,” the policy that sparked the resignations of Johnson and Brexit Secretary David Davis, was presented in Parliament yesterday to pandemonium. When Davis’s replacement, Dominic Raab, attempted to unveil the eagerly anticipated White Paper, he was cut off by lawmakers complaining they hadn’t even seen it. And when M.P.s started chucking copies into the backbenches, Parliament was swiftly suspended. As Politico’s Jack Blanchard noted, the raucous paper-lobbing was arguably a better reception than the one given to the White Paper after Brexiteers had given it a read. “This White Paper has not needed age to turn yellow,” complained Jacob Rees-Mogg.