Not welcome
Trump’s contemptuous tweet at Theresa May yesterday didn’t go down very well in the UK.
Trump’s message came in response to criticism from the British prime minister’s spokesman over the president’s retweeting of incendiary videos posted by the deputy leader of a British far-right group.
Justine Greening, the education secretary, said never mind the tweet, look at the bigger picture: allies, important, mustn’t let a tweet distract, etc.
Sajid Javid, the local government secretary, who is Muslim, took a much harder line. He posted on Twitter: “So POTUS has endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing.”
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has previously clashed with Trump, also issued a strongly-worded statement of condemnation, calling on the prime minister to demand an apology.
President Trump has used Twitter to promote a vile, extremist group that exists solely to sow division and hatred in our country. It's increasingly clear that any official visit from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed. pic.twitter.com/oZ1Kt0JCfY
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) November 30, 2017
Brendan Cox, widower of Jo Cox, an MP murdered last year by a man reportedly shouting “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her, told CNN: “I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order.
“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment, of an organisation that is a hate-driven organisation on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics. This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”
US Democrats joined the condemnation. Keith Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and a Muslim member of Congress, branded the president “a racist”.
But the White House defended the retweets. The principal deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, told reporters on Air Force One: “We think that it’s never the wrong time to talk about security and public safety for the American people. Those are the issues he was raising with the tweets this morning.”
No, they are not. The three tweets had nothing to do with security and public safety for the American people. Trump didn’t mention security and public safety for the American people in those tweets. It would be as if Trump retweeted three racist videos of immigrants from North Korea and then his press people talked about Kim’s nukes – or, for that matter, it would be as if May or Merkel or Macron retweeted three xenophobic videos of Americans behaving badly and their press people said “But Trump!”
They should cancel the state visit.
So many countries have a ‘special relationship’ with the US, or are America’s ‘closest ally’, Don really doesn’t give a rat’s.
Actually, RJW, I think it’s worse than that. I think the Donald believes we need no allies, that we are supreme and able to go it alone, and why should we be part of a coalition of world partners? He believes that they are our inferiors and parasites on our system. He has no proof of any of this, but he needs none. He has John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies to tell him how unique and special we are, and everything else, all the analysis and intelligence and diplomacy is just those damned eggheads taking up oxygen, people who have probably never won a fight in their lives. He sees everyone else as losers, and why would you want to be allies with losers?
iknklast, that’s long been the Republican position. Was it Rumsfeld or the evil sith lord that sneered that while others talked about reality, we create it?
@2 iknklast
,
That’s deeply disturbing, even the Romans needed allies. Allies were the key to Roman imperial power. Presumably Trump is not interested in all that history stuff.
Another example of imperial fantasy. It’s a very unpleasant prospect for those who live in the Asia-Pacific if the US actually retreats and leaves the area to Chinese hegemony. Presumably the presendential ignoramus has absolutely no idea of the consequences.
RJW, he almost certainly has no idea of the consequences, but even if he did, he doesn’t care. That’s what MAGA means – me, me, me, me, me – all the rest are unimportant and can go to hell. They have no real meaning to the current occupant of the West Wing, even if he realized they existed. He knows about the ones that stay in his hotels, of course, unless he assumes those are all Americans abroad.
He has basically the knowledge of the world of a toddler to whom a world map is merely something you spill Spaghetti-Os on.
He doesn’t really even know much about this country. I doubt he could name the capitals of more than a couple of the states, and he doesn’t even consider any American to be worth his time unless they voted for him. He doesn’t realize that all the citizens are entitled to equal treatment no matter who they voted for, and that he is supposed to be the president of everyone. He regards “his people”, and he will throw them off the lifeboat instantaneously at the first hint that they don’t worship him.
In short, Trump views himself not as president, maybe not even as emperor, but as the supreme deity of a very large country with a very large nuclear arsenal, and he is rubbing his hands with glee because now he thinks he can do whatever he wants with that big bomb. And he is simple enough to believe that any problem can be solved by lobbing bombs at it.
No one is safe as long as this man is in the White House…and not particularly safer if he is impeached, since the US as a theocracy would also have negative implications for the rest of the world, especially that portion of the world that has the gall to be something other than Christian (as Pence defines it).
Perhaps the UN could declare us a rogue state, and the western European nations could take us over…though with our enormous military, that might be a bit of a challenge.
@5 iknklast,
You’re obviously far better informed about US politics than I am. However, I still have faith in those institutions previously mentioned. At the risk of overworking the Roman analogy, the Empire survived psychopaths far worse than Trump because its system was robust enough.
Luckily Nero and Caligua didn’t have the nuclear option.
It’s also worth remembering that the US president who took the world closest to nuclear annihilation was the urbane, educated patrician JF Kennedy.
@RJW – but you have to consider the issue of, how much of of the US’s robust systems will Donnie Twoscoops dismantle before his time is done? He’s gutting the mechanisms of government, including (especially?) the institutional knowledge of bipartisan (ex-)career civil servants.
Nero and Caligula might have been terrible emperors, but how much did they actively try to destroy the working mechanics of the empire?
@7 Karellan,
You probably have a point. Nero and Caligua were more interested in having a good time and they didn’t actively try to dismantle the Empire’s system of government, apart from terrorising the Senate.
“We think that it’s never the wrong time to talk about security and public safety for the American people…”
Unless you want to talk about gun control in the wake of (yet another) mass shooting by a white male gunman.
And Nero and Caligula’s falls weren’t exactly examples of the smooth working of the mechanisms of rational government.