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Politics

Theresa May's Condemnation of Trump's Far-Right Tweets Is Embarrassingly Weak

But is that any surprise given her record?
Simon Childs
London, GB
Washington, DC, January 27, 2017, President Donald J. Trump, welcomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May to the White House. (Patsy Lynch / Alamy Stock Photo)

This morning Donald Trump laid into Theresa May on Twitter, after she said it was wrong for him to retweet Britain First.

A spokesperson for May said it was “wrong for the President to have done this”, referring to him re-tweeting fake news peddled by far-right propagandists Britain First. Trump @ed her, saying, “don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”

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Is she gonna take that? Well, yes.

To any normal person this would be a fantastic moment of affirmation. It’s like being called a dickhead by Satan himself. Unfortunately, May can’t even turn getting insulted by the world’s most powerful dotard into a win. At a press conference in Jordan – where she was visiting on a pre-Brexit junket before heading to our trade partners in Saudi Arabia – May was looking about as comfortable as a vampire in sunlight.

Asked if she was going to ask him to stop sending such tweets, she simply repeated her previous criticism of the tweet – it was “the wrong thing to do”. Asked whether Trump had behaved appropriately for a supposed ally, May gave platitudes about, “a long term, special relationship that we have, an enduring relationship…” Asked whether it was still appropriate to invite the Donald for a state visit, she simply said, “The invitation for a state visit has been extended and accepted. We have yet to set a date.” Nothing’s changed. The President is free to publicly tell the PM to shuddup and her comeback is to reaffirm that we’re best of friends. He’s free to re-tweet fake news from the far-right and still be invited round for tea with the Queen.

So, pretty embarrassing for May, and just another example of how thanks to Brexit we have to cravenly cling on to the evil empire no matter what.

But perhaps the real story is how Trump's weird stupidity continues to place him beyond the pale. The President came in for unprecedented criticism in the House of Commons today, where MPs called him “fascist” and “stupid”, and said he was “either racist, incompetent or unthinking or all three”. It would be cool if they regularly applied the same level of critique to British policy. After all, while Trump retweeted Britain First, as Home Secretary Theresa May sent out vans telling migrants to “go home”, a slogan reminiscent of the 1970s National Front.

Just this week it was revealed that a pregnant woman who went to the police to report being kidnapped and raped over a six month period was arrested and interrogated over her immigration status. This comes as a result of May’s “hostile environment”, a policy which ensures that Britain rivals Trump’s America in the hatred-of-the-other stakes.

If only stories like that caused May to sweat as much as Trump's twitter feed does.

@SimonChilds13