Time and again, the prime minister repeats the same old refrain: Brexit will strengthen, not diminish, Britain’s place in the world. It is trotted out in every speech, every interview, every government paper.

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The events of last week should put this ludicrous fantasy to bed once and for all. The post cold war global order is shifting and fast. Donald Trump is withdrawing the United States from its role as the guarantor of global peace. Europe is facing down the rise of populist forces. There’s robust evidence that an emboldened Russia has interfered in key elections in the west and it is suspected of involvement in the fatal poisoning of a British citizen on British soil.

Britain’s response to this global uncertainty beggars belief. On the one hand, we are turning our backs on the European Union, trying and failing to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the world’s most successful – even if imperfect – diplomatic and trade alliance. On the other, we are putting ever greater store in the “special relationship” with the US, just at the very moment Trump is undermining multilateralism and co-operation in the west.

Trump’s visit to Britain should serve as a rude awakening for Theresa May as to the acute dangers of this strategy. The president has displayed all the gracelessness and disrespect that we have come to expect. But beyond this, his trip has served up two chilling reminders that the prime minister would be foolish to ignore.

First, in spite of his hyperbole about the “highest level of special” relationship, he cannot be trusted as an ally. Trump is not a multilateralist. He doesn’t believe in international co-operation. He harbours deep-seated objections to the EU, Nato and the United Nations and has consistently undermined key international treaties such as the Paris agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal.

And so his remarkable about-turn – from declaring that May’s Chequers proposal would make a trade deal between the US and Britain impossible, to saying 24 hours later that it was back on the table – should not have come as a surprise.

This is someone who can’t be taken at his word, who treats his supposed allies with discourtesy bordering on contempt, while professing the greatest of admiration for the dictators who are his supposed enemies. Angela Merkel is doing a “horrific thing” in importing gas from Russia; Vladimir Putin’s probable meddling in the US elections merits only a verbal shrug – “he may deny it. What am I going to do?” He sees no problem in jetting off to Helsinki to meet him just after 12 alleged Russian intelligence agents have been charged with hacking Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Donald Trump has aligned himself with some worrying forces in Britain. Photograph: Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock

Second, Trump’s values fundamentally clash with those of modern Britain. Attitudes to immigration in Britain have become more, not less, positive in recent years; where issues about immigration exist, they are driven mainly by pragmatic concerns. The proportion of people whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to other ethnicities or religions shrank from 13% in 2011 to 5% today. The president, on the other hand, was comfortable using his visit to sound his anti-immigration dog whistles and to continue his hateful attacks on Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. On Thursday, it emerged that one of Trump’s envoys complained to the British ambassador to the United States about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, for disrupting a British trial.

There is, however, one political grouping here in Britain that finds common cause with Trump: the hard-Brexit ideologues on the right of the Tory party. They are united in their hatred of the EU.

But there is one big difference: while the global might of the US imbues Trump with the power to act unilaterally, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have an utterly inflated view of Britain’s place in the world that harks back to Britain as a 19th-century colonial power. They want us to leave a trading bloc, whose rules and regulations we have had a powerful role in shaping, in order to become a rule-taker through free trade deals with economies much bigger than ours. The US would undoubtedly dictate the terms of a trade deal with Britain – a race to the bottom on regulatory standards.

This is why Trump was right about one thing on his visit: May’s Chequers proposals would make a US trade deal impossible because signing up to regulatory alignment with the EU on goods precludes that race to the bottom. It would involve downgrading ourselves from rule-maker to rule-taker in the EU, in the vague hope of getting thrown a few free trade scraps from the US.

Trump is highly unpopular in the UK. A braver or stronger leader than May would level with the British public: leaving the EU means hooking our national fortunes to this caricature of a president and any benevolence he may or may not choose to show Britain. Sycophantically rolling out the red carpet for Trump is a fitting metaphor for the path May, held hostage by the hard Brexiters, is leading Britain down. We will live to regret the consequences.