My relationship with Donald Trump? You could call it ‘special’
After THAT tweet, Britain First boss crows at secret ‘rally’:
A LEADER of the far-Right British group ‘endorsed’ by Donald Trump gleefully boasted yesterday that she now has a ‘special relationship’ with the US President.
Jayda Fransen achieved international notoriety last week when Mr Trump shared her inflammatory anti-Muslim videos with his 44 million followers.
But it sparked a war of words between the President and Theresa May and led to his ‘working visit’ to t he UK next month being cancelled.
Fransen, 31, deputy leader of Britain First, said: ‘I think the special relationship may have broken down between May and Trump.’ Asked if she – not the Prime Minister – now enjoys a special relations hi p with t he President, s he beamed: ‘Exactly.’
Fransen, who has claimed that Trump’s re-tweeting of her videos amounts to an endorsement of Britain First by the US President, was speaking to an undercover Mail on Sunday reporter who infiltrated the extremist organisation’s secret annual conference yesterday.
One delegate, Paul Rimmer, who is due to stand as a Britain First candidate in local elections next year, told the meeting that Trump’s re-tweeting of Ms Fransen’s videos was ‘absolutely mind-blowing’. He said the President had ‘found an ally’ in Fransen, adding :‘ You couldn’t get a Hollywood director to put that together. You couldn’t get a novelist to write that.’
He added: ‘We have got the President of the United States on our side. What an ally that is.’
In a rant-filled speech, he said Muslims ‘have come here to take what is ours… they have come here to take over our cities, city by city, town by town’.
Before Mr Trump re- tweeted Fransen’s videos, Britain First was a marginal group with about 800 members. But his intervention catapulted the extremists into the public spotlight and they boasted of a massive injection of support.
However, only 70‘ patriots’ answered the call to attend the AGM at the Wyboston Lakes leisure centre complex in Little Barford, Bedfordshire, yesterday.
In addition to praising Mr Trump, delegates applauded as Mrs May was accused of encouraging the Islamic takeover of the UK. One speaker denounced Islam as an ‘evil’ religion.
Strong support for
‘We have President on our side – what an ally’
banning Trump’s state visit to Britain planned for 2018 emerged in a new Survation poll for The Mail on Sunday. A total of 50 per cent said the state visit should be called off, with 37 per cent in favour of it going ahead.
The Prime Minister was judged to have made a mistake by offering the state visit at the beginning of Trump’s presidency by an almost identical margin.
Britain First had planned to hold its conference in Coventry but there were widespread protests when the news leaked.
The group’s Facebook page later stated that the location had changed to Bedfordshire due to police bail conditions faced by its leader Paul Golding and his ex-partner Fransen, who both face trial for religiously aggravated harassment. Britain First said in an email to the MoS t hat t he Press was ‘ officially banned’ from the event.
But a reporter was able to gain access after filling in an application form online and paying £5. In a series of cloak and dagger instructions, he was told to rendezvous with other delegates at a remote Shell petrol station five miles from Cambridge at 2pm yesterday.
They were met by a portly Britain First official called Gary standing furtively outside who gave the reporter a postcode which turned out to be for the Wyboston Lakes complex around ten miles away. He told him to ask for the Oakley suite. Once there, the reporter was greeted by Golding, who shook his hand.
The room was decorated with placards bearing pictures of Lord Nelson and Winston Churchill and emblazoned with slogans such as ‘Taking Our Country Back’.
Delegates had to listen to recordings of military marching music while the start of the conference was delayed because some supporters got lost on the way. Golding then opened the conference by issuing a ‘ word of warning’. ‘If there are undercover journalists in this room, we will find you,’ he said. ‘You will get bounced off the walls and every door imaginable before you are kicked out of the building.’ One member of the audience then asked: ‘ Who’s this Donald Trump guy?’ Fransen snapped back: ‘He’s just a mate of mine.’
THEY might be forgivable in a teenager or a drunken undergraduate, perhaps. But disobliging 3am tweets from the President of the United States to the Prime Minister of a nation that is his closest ally are a very different matter.
When, in the small hours of the morning, Donald Trump rudely demanded of Theresa May that she ‘ focus on the destructive radical Islamic terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom’ – instead of apologising for his own disreputable spreading of far- Right propaganda – the Prime Minister had every right to view his message as a direct and offensive attack.
All the more so as teetotal Donald Trump is no drunkard. Perhaps his intemperate response to what was no more than a mild rebuke from Mrs May was piqued by the fact that he cannot bear being challenged by a woman. Certainly, like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II – of whom it was said ‘every day was his birthday’ – Trump lashes out at anyone who rains on his parade.
Yet his tweets were also carefully calculated to show the more rabid elements of his American political base that he shares their fears of global radical Islam, regardless of the diplomatic damage caused on the way. These are also part and parcel of a White House increasingly in disarray as the few voices of reason are ejected or resign, while hawkish ideologues such as Senator Tom Cotton wait in the wings.
MANY hoped that the Trump we saw on the campaign trail would calm down once he assumed the Presidency, that he would, perhaps, be constrained by expert advisers. With his administration collapsing around him, however, Trump seems unwilling, or unable, to alter course.
Former National Security Adviser Lieutenant General Michael Flynn has landed the latest blow, pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his meetings with the Russian ambassador shortly before Trump’s election victory. For a long time it seemed as if Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into illegal contacts between Trump’s campaign team and the Russians was going nowhere. But Mueller did not survive for a decade as FBI director for nothing. After indicting three peripheral players, he has now ‘ turned’ Flynn, who has agreed to testify about Trump’s inner circle.
Meanwhile, the State Department – the equivalent of the Foreign Office – is in chaos, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, an oil executive, hovering by the exit door. Tillerson, who is reported to have described Trump as a ‘moron’, is clearly uncomfortable with an erratic chief who uses his own son-inlaw Jared Kushner for highlevel diplomatic missions.
The department’s budget has been cut by 30 per cent, 50 ambassadorships are unfilled, and many of its demoralised foreign experts have taken early retirement. Now Mueller’s investigation is lapping at the feet of Kushner, who may have authorised Flynn’s contacts with the Russians.
Regardless of whether Flynn’s testimony eventually embroils Trump himself, this uniquely dysfunctional administration has already damaged US global power. China and Russia are stepping into the vacuum. Several close allies have been alienated by Trump’s caustic utterances – Germany, for example, and now Britain. Nato is also in his firing line.
This instability is bad news for a Britain which, because of the vote to leave the European Union, looks increasingly isolated. The so- called special relationship means little with a White House in the grip of such mania. It leaves Theresa May with an almost impossible hand: she cannot truly rile such an important post-Brexit ally, yet to ignore Trump’s calculated insults risks international humiliation and an open goal for Jeremy Corbyn. No wonder Trump’s impending visit to Britain is indefinitely delayed.
Trump’s incompetence is even worse news for the wider world, particularly those parts relying on the safety and stability of Pax Americana. Bitterly divided and polarised, the United States does not have a coherent foreign policy, but rather a series of spasms which reflect Trump’s limited attention span.
AMERICA keeps 11,000 troops in Qatar, yet Trump tweets that it sponsors terrorism. America has vigorously supported Ukrainian independence from Russian influence, yet Trump’s lieutenants seem happy to allow Vladimir Putin to regain control. American policy is to calm the situation in North Korea, yet Trump mocks Kim Jong Un as ‘Little Rocket Man’.
The result? The testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead as far as New York – and London. Worst of all, with every changing of the guard at the top, real extremists move closer to power. Trump’s former Svengali, the polemicist Steve
Trump seems unwilling, or unable, to change course
Bannon, is using money and media muscle to repopulate the Republican Party with firebreathing populists, and using the power of his Right- wing Breitbart website to identify foreign ‘winners’ such as Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who Bannon met in London last week.
At the top, there’s little hope for a more stable and sensible leadership. CIA head Mike Pompeo is likely to replace Tillerson when he leaves. In turn, aggressive first-term senator Cotton is in the running to replace Pompeo. He supports torture – as does the President – and wants regime change in Iran. Needless to say, he is a Trump loyalist.
The big worry is that, sooner rather than later, the chaos at the White House will spill over into outright war. And it’s not just North Korea that could become an arena of conflict. Once Tillerson is ejected, it is likely the hawks around him will seek to address long-term enemy Iran, whose influence the generals learned to fear and hate from their time fighting in Iraq.
The consequences in either case could be devastating.
If 2017 has been a dangerous year with these men in charge, 2018 may well be even worse. With Brexit looming and our stock in Europe at an all-time low, just how close can Britain stand to Trump’s increasingly erratic America?
Past sentiment is not a good guide to present policy. It is time for Theresa May to take a cautious step away.