President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Junior, has said British Prime Minister Theresa May should have listened to his father’s advice on how to conduct Brexit negotiations as the process to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union bounces from one crisis to the next.
The comments from Donald Junior came in an opinion column published in British right of centre, formerly conservative, newspaper the Daily Telegraph, where Mr Trump echoed previous comments by the President and Brexit leader Nigel Farage by linking the Brexit referendum to the 2016 Presidential election, and the forthcoming 2020 race.
It has now been 1,000 days since the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, but despite nearly three years of ‘negotiations’ between the government and the European Union, the country seems as far as ever from actually leaving. Prime Minister May has even gone so far as threatening the country with no Brexit at all if politicians don’t line up to support her unpopular and controversial Brexit deal.
Mr Trump compared the no-holds-barred tactics by the British and European establishment to stop Brexit from going ahead to attacks on his father in the U.S., stating that the fight for independence was not yet over and that “the people of both the UK and the US must reaffirm the decisions they made in 2016 to stand up for themselves against the global elite.”
Noting the “desperate, last-gasp attempt by those previously in power” to overturn the 2016 revolutions, Mr Trump was particularly scornful of UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who has led the United Kingdom through the bulk of the Brexit process, while achieving little for the British people.
Rhetorically asking whether the promises of May and other top UK political figures to honour the result of the referendum was just a ruse, Mr Trump called on the UK establishment to respect democracy:
Since 2016, Prime Minister Theresa May has promised on more than 50 separate occasions that Britain would leave the EU on March 29 2019. She needs to honour that promise.
But Mrs May ignored advice from my father, and ultimately, a process that should have taken only a few short months has become a years-long stalemate, leaving the British people in limbo.
Now, the clock has virtually run out and almost all is lost – exactly as the European elites were hoping. Some pro-Brexit politicians even suggest that Mrs May herself is trying to sabotage Brexit, by insisting that Parliament agree to a deal that essentially keeps Britain bound to the EU indefinitely.
Mr Trump noted that the fast approaching Brexit deadline, due next Friday, March 29th, was almost certainly to be cancelled to give the political class even more time than the nearly three years they have already had, and wrote with apparent regret that democracy in the UK was “all but dead.”
The comments by the high-profile son of the United States President seem to reflect a broad scepticism among British voters about the intentions of key individuals at the top of UK and EU politics. Breitbart London reported today on polling that found 44 per cent of UK respondents believed the government had set out to frustrate Brexit from day one, with just 27 per cent not believing that was the case.
Perhaps even more damning was the finding that 68 per cent did not even trust Members of Parliament to “do the right thing by the country over Brexit”. Sixty-one per cent said they thought Brussels, the home of the European Union’s institutions, was working to punish Britain by being as inflexible as possible during the Brexit process.
Trump Jr’s comments on Mrs May ignoring advice from the President comes just days after President Trump, a long-standing supporter of Britain leaving the European Union, lamented the poor progress the Prime Minister had made to date. Speaking at the White House, Trump said: “I’m surprised at how badly it has all gone from a standpoint of negotiations, but I gave the Prime Minister my ideas of how to negotiate it, she didn’t listen to that and that’s fine but it could have been negotiated in a different manner.”
He concluded it was not looking possible for the UK to leave the EU on the March 29th date repeatedly promised to the British people, and remarked to the cameras: “It’s very sad to see what’s happening there.”
Oliver JJ Lane is the editor of Breitbart London — Follow him on Twitter and Facebook