 |
“So,
Theresa May woke this morning to find out that she now has something in common
with Kim Jong-un. Like the North Korean dictator, the prime minister has joined
the list of world leaders who have now been derided on Twitter by President
Trump.
It
certainly marks something of a first for the “special relationship”. Presidents
and prime ministers have often rowed bitterly in private, and these
disagreements have sometimes spilt out in public too, but getting slagged off
on social media? God knows what Churchill and FD Roosevelt would have had to
say about this.”
GUARDIAN
|
Donald
Trump attacks Theresa May over her criticism of his far-right retweets
In rare
clash between allies, US president tells May to focus on terrorism rather than
on him – but sends the tweet to the wrong person
David Smith
in Washington
Thursday 30
November 2017 09.40 GMT First published on Thursday 30 November 2017 01.14 GMT
Donald
Trump has publicly rebuked Theresa May over her criticism of anti-Muslim
propaganda, opening an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the transatlantic
allies.
“Theresa@theresamay,
don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is
taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted on Wednesday
evening. “We are doing just fine!”
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.
However,
the “@theresamay” Twitter handle that Trump targeted does not belong to Theresa
May, the British prime minister, but a woman called Theresa Scrivener. Minutes
later Trump deleted and reposted the tweet, this time with the correct handle:
@Theresa_May.
The angry
tirade, crowning one of the most wayward days yet of Trump’s presidency, earned
a swift putdown from the US senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who met May at Downing
Street last week to discuss terrorism threats to both countries. He tweeted:
“PM @theresa_may is one of the great world leaders, I have incredible love and
respect for her and for the way she leads the United Kingdom, especially in the
face of turbulence.”
May is
currently on a tour of the Middle East and declined to immediately respond to
the personal rebuke from Trump.
May is in
Jordan, where she is due to deliver a major speech outlining her hopes for
increasing UK influence in the region after Brexit.
But her
trip, during which May also visited Iraq – the first British PM to do so in
nearly a decade – and Saudi Arabia, was dominated by questions over the
behaviour of Trump.
May’s
officials with her in Jordan declined repeated requests on Thursday morning for
a response to the new tweet. It is expected that the prime minister will deal
with the issue in questions after her speech.
Among the
likely questions will be whether she regrets being the first overseas leader to
visit Trump after his inauguration, and his planned state visit to the UK.
The prime
minister is due to cover this threat in a part of the speech dealing with more
direct security assistance in the region, also including training for Iraqi
forces to clear Mosul and Raqqa of explosive devices left by Isis as it fled,
and more security assistance for Jordan.
Justine
Greening, the education secretary, said the row should not undermine the UK’s
long and close relationship with the US.
Asked if
she was shocked that Trump was directly attacking a close ally, Greening told
the BBC’s Today programme: “The UK and US have been longstanding allies and our
relationship with America is a hugely important one, and I don’t think we
should allow this tweet to undermine that in any way... (our relationship) will
succeed long after presidents come and go and I don’t agree with the tweet
President Trump has made but I also don’t believe it should distract from the
agenda we have domestically or detract from the close relationship the UK has
had for many many years and will go on to have with the American people.”
However,
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 feud
marks a new, unexpected twist in the “special relationship” that has benefited
from personal chemistry between leaders such as Winston Churchill and Franklin
Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and Tony Blair and Bill
Clinton.
There had
been hopes that May and Trump – whose mother was British – would achieve a
similar rapport. She was the first foreign leader to visit after he took
office: they were photographed holding hands at the White House and she invited
him on a state visit to the UK. But that has yet to take place after a series
of controversies and warnings that protesters will take to the streets to show
he is not welcome.
Hostility
in the UK deepened on Wednesday when Trump highlighted videos from the feed of
Jayda Fransen of Britain First that purported to show a group of Muslims
pushing a boy off a roof. Another claimed to show a Muslim destroying a statue
of the Virgin Mary, and a third claimed to show a Muslim immigrant hitting a
Dutch boy on crutches.
The
credibility of the last video was immediately undermined when the the Dutch
embassy in the US said the perpetrator of the violent act in the video was born
and raised in the Netherlands. Fransen has been charged with using threatening
or abusive language following an appearance at a far-right rally in Belfast
this summer.
May’s
spokesman made clear Trump’s invitation still stood but said it was “wrong for
the president to have done this”. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, added:
“UK has a proud history as an open, tolerant society & hate speech has no
place here.”
The Labour
party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described the retweets as “abhorrent, dangerous
and a threat to our society”. He and several other members of parliament called
for the state visit to be cancelled.
The Labour
MP David Lammy posted: “Trump sharing Britain First. Let that sink in. The
President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate
group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend
of ours. @realDonaldTrump you are not welcome in my country and my city.”
Justin
Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, urged Trump to remove the retweets. And
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.”
Asked if
Trump was aware of the source of the tweets, Shah replied: “I haven’t spoken to
him about that.”
The
spokesman insisted: “The president has the greatest respect for the British
people and for Prime Minister May.”
Trump’s new
salvo echoed his criticism in June of London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, after seven
people were killed and 48 injured in a terror attack in the city. Khan, the
first Muslim mayor of a western European capital city, hit back on that
occasion and tweeted on Wednesday: “Britain First is a vile, hate-fuelled
organisation whose views should be condemned, not amplified.”
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