Ex-president’s backers hail Lammy’s approach
Donald Trump’s supporters are thrilled by the latest outreach efforts by shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, saying the Labour interest shows an acceptance that the former president will soon be back in the White House.
“They saw that Donald Trump’s policies on the international stage worked,” says Kash Patel, a senior adviser to Mr Trump during his presidency.
Mr Patel told i it was “wise” for Mr Lammy and others “to make relationships that don’t antagonise”. Mr Patel thinks the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is willing to “work with anyone to achieve the goals of his agenda… as long as you can find a way forward that is agreeable, and that helps, from his perspective, the USA”.
Other prominent Republicans praised Mr Lammy for backing Mr Trump’s efforts to get Europe to contribute more to its own defence.
Over talks at Washington’s rightleaning Hudson Institute this week, Mr Lammy insisted there was nothing new or threatening about Mr Trump’s defence warnings.
“Friends, even when I was at Harvard during the Balkan Wars, the United States was asking Europe to do more for its own security,” Mr Lammy said. “Ever since President Kennedy, the United States has been asking for Europe to do more.”
One of Lammy’s interlocutors this week, Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence in the first Trump administration, told i he backed Mr Lammy’s efforts to get Europe to focus on its own defence.
“Lammy is at least saying… that they are going to focus more on Europe, work with European countries and spend 2.5 per cent on defence,” said Mr Colby – who does not speak for Mr Trump or his campaign.
“Europeans should understand that a more – quote, unquote – ‘America First’ foreign policy could work quite well with what is often considered to be a centre-left European agenda,” said Mr Colby.
Mr Lammy, who just six years ago described Mr Trump as a “tyrant in a toupee”, is now encouraging Republicans to believe he thinks the former president is “a leader whose attitude to European security is often misunderstood”.