A planned “working visit” to the United Kingdom by U.S. President Donald Trump has been cancelled following Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to publicly upbraid him over Twitter retweets.
The prime minister said the president was “wrong” to share videos purporting to show Muslims committing acts of violence while on a visit to the Middle East, where she is attempting to curry favour with local dictators.
President Trump did not hesitate to rebuke the British politician, telling her: “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!”
News that the president has cancelled a planned “working visit” to open the new U.S. embassy in London came in the early hours of the following morning.
“The idea of a visit has obviously been floated, but not December and not January. I would not expect a Trump visit in January,” a senior U.S. diplomat told The Telegraph.
This unwelcome development comes only a little over two months since Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam speculated that May — who supported Remaining in the European Union in 2016, and leads a Remainer-dominated Cabinet — would attempt to manufacture a row with the Trump administration in order to sabotage Britain’s prospects outside the bloc.
“Look at the way she treated President Trump at the United Nations,” he reminded readers in a September 2017 think piece.
“Instead of using her speech to promote Britain in the world, she used it to attack President Trump on immigration and refugees, as well as harping on about climate change deals and a long-deceased Pakistani prime minister. Not a single mention of the word ‘Brexit’.”
Kassam believes that sabotaging the prospects of the “very big, very powerful” trade agreement which the U.S. president has been seeking with Brexit Britain will be used by the prime minister to push for Britain to remain more closely entangled with the European Union after departure than it would otherwise need to be.
“She’s going insult Trump to the point where the U.S. won’t want to do a deal with Britain, then she’ll blame Trump for being mercurial and say we need to water down, or abandon Brexit because Britain needs economic security,” he stated.
BBC anchor Jane Hill suggested to Kassam that the current Twitter row has “nothing to do with Brexit” after he reiterated his belief that “the British political establishment is calculatedly using this to try and drive a wedge, because they don’t want Brexit to happen”.
With the working visit now cancelled, his interpretation appears increasingly persuasive.