Boris Johnson hasn’t been as positive about Donald Trump as the latter imagines
Washington and Westminster politics seemed to merge on Monday, as Donald Trump arrived in London for a state visit — tweeting insults from Air Force One at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan — just as Boris Johnson, described by the American president as “a friend of mine,” officially launched his campaign to become the country’s new prime minister.
Before his trip, Trump had warm words for Johnson in an interview with The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid. Asked if he would look forward to working with a Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Trump suggested that he would, in part because “he has been very positive about me.”
Those comments suggest that Trump has forgotten or just never heard that Johnson had, in fact, denounced him as “clearly out of his mind” in late 2015, when the then-candidate for the American presidency first called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
“You can’t ban people going to the United States in that way, or indeed to any country,” Johnson, then London’s mayor, told a television crew two days after Trump suggested closing America’s borders to Muslims in a campaign speech on December 7, 2015. [Continue reading…]