What could possibly go wrong?

“Historically, British politicians have basked in the reflected glory of U.S. presidents, going back to Thatcher and Reagan. Obama was such a rock star, particularly with people in government who were all desperate to be seen and look relaxed with him,” said Stig Abell, the editor and publisher of The Times Literary Supplement. “With Trump, they just want to finish it without anything too bad happening. The Royal Family want to get it done without it being embarrassing. The government don’t want him to be caught in protests. They don’t want anything where he’ll come back and tweet about how appalled he is about Britain.”

Trump’s arrival in London on Thursday afternoon interrupted a day of national wallowing. All morning, the BBC, seeming to find a certain morose pleasure in self-flagellation, played images on repeat of England’s loss to Croatia and ouster from the World Cup on Wednesday night—England’s Harry Kane missing a header over and over; Croatia’s Ivan Rakitić’s match-winning goal in extra time over and over—with a mournful soundtrack of Oasis’s 1996 hit “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

Once the anthem of the Cool Britannia of the 1990s—that long-gone era of multilateralism, Third Way Labor, the end of history—the song now triggers instant nostalgia and a whiff of resignation in a country in the throes of a messy and unresolved divorce from Europe. Like so many divorces, it’s not clear if the marriage itself was the problem or if the desire for a breakup stemmed from some deep and inchoate unhappiness on the part of Britain—Britain just, you know, wanted more freedom from Europe, but hey, it would be great if that freedom could come without consequences. May is now trying to hash out the details while holding her government together.

If Brexit was a referendum on how Britain sees itself and its place in the world, then a Trump visit was bound to be complicated—a visit by a president who has upended international diplomacy to a country that has upended its relationship with Europe. The lines of support and dissent are entangled. Urban versus rural. Liberalism versus illiberalism. Isolationism versus globalism. Some Brexiteers are enamored of Trump and his “America First” stance, and many in the British establishment admire his pushing back against the European Union, even if they superciliously find his approach rather vulgar.

Cosmopolitans oppose Trump’s entire worldview, including what they call out as his racism. Anti-Trump demonstrations are planned in London, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim to be elected mayor of London, wrote in the London Evening Standard why he’d allowed the protests. “Around the world, the far-right and nationalist populism are on the rise. Politics, ideas and views that we thought were rejected and defeated after the Second World War—in large part due to the leadership and sacrifices of the U.S.—have resurfaced and are creeping back into the political mainstream,” Khan wrote.