Of all the things that Brexit has ruined – up to and including the ability to make civil conversation with your dad – foreign travel has to sting the most. Get an aeroplane anywhere and you’ll understand what I mean. Almost overnight, the predominant national stereotype around the world has become the Self-Sabotaging Brit.

Unless you happen to go somewhere brimming with expats, all British holidaymakers this summer can be expected to be treated with outright pity. We’ll be met with sad glances and bewilderment in lobbies and cafes, seen as the morons who willingly flung themselves into a threshing machine thanks to a displaced sense of global importance. We’ve become the village idiots of the world, seen as doltish and shortsighted and proud, and nobody can quite understand why the hell we’ve done this to ourselves.

It’s an awful situation to be in, because it upsets the natural order of things. We’re the ones who are meant to sneer at foreign tourists; coming over here with their garish backpacks and eating at all the wrong restaurants and becoming baffled to the point of tears by our strictly upheld escalator etiquette. We’re supposed to look at them, being ferried between designer outlet villages like cattle, and feel an overwhelming sense of superiority. After all, we’re Britain. At one point we probably owned wherever it is they’re from, plus we won Eurovision 20 years ago. Our entitlement is spectacularly well-earned.

But, oh no, instead we’ve got to spend our richly deserved two weeks off work forlornly attempting to justify Brexit to a group of strangers who won’t stop acting like they’ve just discovered an on-the-run lobotomy patient. It’s a tragedy – and, worse, a self-inflicted one – but at least we might have just stumbled across an out. That out, needless to say, is Donald Trump.

Trump’s Big Foreign Trip has been hilarious. He has been the very picture of a bad tourist gone feral. He’s the worst person you’ve ever met abroad. Everything Trump has done since leaving the comfort of the US has been astonishing, almost as if the Russians have paid him to create a bonk-headed one-man library of gifs designed to denigrate all travelling Americans.

With every breath of his trip, Trump has managed to carve out an image of a terrified old man several leagues out of his depth. He goes to Saudi Arabia, and ends up palming a glowing orb like a bewildered ITV daytime game show contestant. He goes to Italy, and ends up experiencing a papal visit so excruciating that it came off like the pilot of an unmade sitcom entitled The Pope and The Dope. He goes to Belgium, and barges Montenegro’s president out of the way so brazenly that the only logical explanation is that he somehow mistook the occasion for a beauty queen molestation contest with a prize of unlimited ketchup-drenched steaks. Best of all, whenever he attempts to lurch into any sort of publicly affectionate display with his own wife, she furiously bats his hands away as if they are made of bees. If you can magically bring yourself to forget that you’re watching the most powerful man in the world, it has been terrific.

And it has given us a common bond with rest of the world. Now, instead of trying to explain Nigel Farage to the people we meet on holiday, we can deflect all the unwanted attention with Trump. “You think we’re bad?” we can ask. “Well, get a load of this git.” It’s a boon for us when we need it the most. However, the danger is that Trump will reflect badly on American tourists.

All countries have their stereotypes, whether it’s football hooliganism or a readiness to deploy beach towels on sunloungers too eagerly. Americans have only just crawled out from underneath a stereotype that has long persisted. There’s a mention of them in A Room with a View – “Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?” “Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog” – and the theme has continued through everything from EuroTrip to Team America. American tourists, the legend goes, are brash and arrogant.

The truth is, you could dump a truckload of tourists of any nationality – yes, including mine – into the middle of a city, and they would all look preposterously out of place. All tourists are bad. Even you.

However, there is something especially bad about Trump. His casual readjustment after shoving that poor Montenegrin. His alligator-wrestle of a handshake. His obnoxious, unearned swagger. Donald Trump is the world’s worst tourist, and the fact that he happens to be American is colossally unfortunate.

But one man does not represent an entire country, and we would do well to remember that, just as I’ll remember it on holiday whenever anyone tries to bring up Boris Johnson.