Well, London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan and President Trump are at it again. Concerning UK-U.S. relations, you can saw they’re rather poor between these two men. Khan has been critical of the president’s policies, specifically the executive order on immigration, which some viewed wrongly as a Muslim ban. Despite lawsuits from liberal state attorneys general that gummed up the works, this legal question finally reached the Supreme Court, where they allowed broad enforcement of the order to commence. The provision that got liberals frothing at the mouth was the travel moratorium from six predominantly Muslim countries. As Katie noted, Trump expanded the list of countries over the weekend:
Sudan has been dropped from the original travel ban list, while Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia remain. North Korea, Chad and Venezuela have been added with varying levels of vetting and restrictions for each country. Citizens traveling from North Korea and Venezuela are not affected, only government officials.
With Trump, he’s slammed Khan for what he sees as a failure to combat terrorism effectively. First with the June terror attacks on London Bridge that left several people dead and almost 50 wounded. The back-and-forth between the president and the London mayor goes back to 2015, where Khan slammed Trump for saying there are no-go zones in the city. Now, Trump directed some criticism towards the UK as a whole, saying that the perpetrators who recently set off a bomb in the London subway were in the sights of the nation’s law enforcement authorities. That did not sit well with UK authorities, according to Politico. They added that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster had to clear up the remarks. In the wake of this, Khan has now compared Trump’s rhetoric to ISIS (via The Guardian):
Sadiq Khan accused Donald Trump of adopting the language of Islamic State and “playing their game” by adopting the terror group’s clash of civilisations rhetoric.
Speaking at a Guardian Live event at the Labour party conference in Brighton, the London mayor said he was a “reluctant participant” in the continuing hostility between himself and the US president.
But Khan made it clear that he was offended by Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims and the president’s claim that he would make an exception for the Labour politician.
“My view was firstly ‘I’m not exceptional’ and secondly ‘Think about what you are saying.’ Because what you are saying is not dissimilar to what Daesh or so-called IS says.
“They say that there is a clash of civilisations, it is not possible to be a Muslim and a westerner, and the west hates us. And you are inadvertently playing their game, you are helping them.”
Well, par for the course I guess when it comes to Trump attacks. He’s a racist, bigot, homophobe, anti-Semite, sexist, misogynist, white supremacist, and now an ISIS-like figure. And guess what—no one cares. Voters don’t care. Not a single one of these attacks lobbed by the presidents political enemies closer to home—the Democrats—have resonated with voters. They still like his business background, that he’s an outsider, and are giving him credit for the improving economy. We should expect a response from Trump on this. If not, no harm is done; the man is the Teflon Don (for now).
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