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Opinion | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Prime Minister, Tell Trump Hes Not Welcome in Britain

Matthew dAncona NOV. 30, 2017

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Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and President Trump at the NATO summit
conference in May.
Credit
Pool photo by Matt Dunham
LONDON Donald Trumps state visit to Britain should be canceled without delay.
The withdrawal of the invitation extended to the president in January by Prime
Minister Theresa May would indeed be a diplomatic embarrassment and given Mr.
Trumps vindictive temperament would be unlikely to go unpunished. Such a
decision is never easy to take. But it must be taken.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump retweeted a series of anti-Muslim videos posted by
Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, an ultranationalist group so far
to the right that it is repudiated by nearly every sector of British politics and
society.
It is hard to exaggerate how disgusted Britons are by the presidents recent
behavior on Twitter. The prime minister responded on Thursday, saying, Im very
clear that retweeting from Britain First was the wrong thing to do. Before her,
Sajid Javid, the communities secretary and a Muslim, wrote on Twitter: So POTUS
has endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organization that hates me and
people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing. Jeremy
Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, called the retweets abhorrent, dangerous
and a threat to our society.
It is worth bearing in mind that Ms. Fransen who celebrated the attention
delivered by the American president is facing charges of religiously aggravated
harassment. At least one of the original videos, captioned Muslim migrant beats up
Dutch boy on crutches!, is completely inauthentic. The others are of dubious
provenance at best.
What is so shocking is that Mr. Trump, who has more than 43 million Twitter
followers, should so casually proliferate content tweeted by an organization that
actively subverts the social cohesion of a country that is, at least notionally,
Americas closest ally.
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Those in Britain who follow the presidents unfiltered outpourings on social media
have learned to expect an aggressive stream of consciousness. But this insult,
delivered in so cavalier a fashion, is of a different order.
Mr. Trump only compounded the affront by telling the prime minister again in a
tweet not to focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism
that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!
Im sure you are, Mr. Trump. But that is not the response of a friend. It is the
dismissive taunt of the worlds most overpromoted playground bully.
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As it happens, I came to the conclusion that Mr. Trumps visit should be canceled
in August, after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. When
the most powerful person in the world fails the simplest test of democratic
leadership answering the question Were the Nazis uniquely bad? the whole
world is involved. The president failed that test conspicuously and gave comfort to
the loathsome identitarianism that understands society as a competition between
races, tribes and religion.
Groups like Britain First and their counterparts across Europe were inspired by Mr.
Trumps refusal to single out for condemnation the white supremacists; they
understood his reticence to be a wink of recognition. Now the wink has escalated
into something close to outright endorsement.
In February, members of Parliament debated a petition signed by more than 1.8
million people objecting to Mr. Trumps state visit. They were told by Mrs. Mays
ministerial colleagues that Britains diplomatic, strategic and commercial
interests must override distaste for the American presidents racism, misogyny and
offhand bigotry.
It remains true that canceling the invitation would be a monumental headache. As
Britain wrestles with the horrible details of Brexit, a bilateral trade deal with
the United States is of the greatest importance. Our respective military,
intelligence and diplomatic communities cooperate as closely as any in the world.
The special relationship may not be what is was in the era of Harold Macmillan
and John Kennedy or Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but it is more than a
polite fiction.
Such matters are technically in the hands of the Royal Visits Committee and
attended by representatives of the prime ministers office, the Cabinet Office, the
Department for International Trade, the Foreign Office and the royal household. But
if Mrs. May recommended that the invitation be rescinded, the committee would
almost certainly respect her wishes.
Will she? Almost certainly not. Weakened by a poor performance in the June general
election and buffeted by the headwinds of Brexit, the prime minister is disinclined
to take such a risk.
The nervous pragmatists around Mrs. May point out that the queen has hosted more
than 100 such visits, many of them by repellent individuals, including dictators
like Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
But that misses the point. It is precisely because of Britains close relationship
with the United States what Barack Obama called our partnership of the heart
that this case is so very different. The true Atlanticist always puts our shared
history and the principles it enshrines ahead of immediate tactical considerations.
Britains covenant is with the American people and the values for which they stand,
not with whoever occupies the White House. That covenant has been grievously
breached by a man who daily besmirches the great office he holds and thinks little
of insulting the most steadfast friend of the United States. Time to call time on
his nonsense.
Matthew dAncona (@MatthewdAncona) is a political columnist for The Guardian and
The Evening Standard and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion),
and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 1, 2017, on Page A27 of the
New York edition with the headline: Trump Is Not Welcome in Britain. Today's Paper|
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