This is your weekly instalment of WTF is going on because, these days, a lot can happen in a week…
At first it was all hand holding and mutual appreciation but you had to wonder what it would take for Theresa May to denounce Donald Trump. The president’s decision to retweet Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of far-right group Britain First (which rose from the ashes of the British National Party) was, it seems, the final straw…sort of.
Yesterday May publically rebuked Trump for sharing the group’s propaganda videos. ‘I am very clear that retweeting from Britain First the wrong thing to do’ she said as it was confirmed that the UK’s ambassador to Washington had formally made a complaint about the president’s tweeting.
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May then attempted to imply that Trump’s retweeting of a racist organisation would not affect our so-called special relationship with the United States ‘the fact that we work together does not mean that we are afraid to say when we think that the United States have got it wrong and to be very clear with them. I am very clear that retweeting from Britain First was the wrong thing to do’. Should we work with a president who thinks nothing of endorsing divisive racist propaganda?
The prime minister then added, ‘Britain First is a hateful organisation. It seeks to spread division and mistrust in our communities. It stands in fundamental opposition to the values that we share as a nation – values of respect, tolerance and, dare I say it, common decency’.
May’s condemnation of Trump sounds fine, but does it go far enough? Fransen doesn’t just disseminate hate on the internet (though this in itself would be reason enough not to retweet her), she has been convicted of hate crimes and, more than that, faces further charges. In September, this year Fransen was charged with not one, two or three, but four counts of religious harassment. In 2016, she was convicted after she abused a Muslim woman wearing hijab.
In their mission statement, Britain First described themselves as ‘a patriotic political party and street movement’ who have set out to ‘oppose’ and ‘fight’ the ‘many injustices that are routinely inflicted on the British people’. The go on to say ‘We will not stand back and watch as our people are made second class citizens by leftwing-liberal policies and political correctness. We want our people to come first, before foreigners, asylum seekers or migrants and we are overtly proud of this stance’. However, they fail to list any statistics or data which back up their nationalistic posturing.
It matters that Trump retweeted Britain First and remains unapologetic for doing so because there is absolutely no doubt that they are a racist group who promote ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideologies. The group organise what they call ‘Christian patrols’ and takes it upon themselves to ‘invade’ mosques as though they are on a warped crusade.
By retweeting Fransen, Trump effectively endorsed Britain First and gave them the oxygen of exposure to his 43 million followers. It doesn’t seem to matter to Trump or his White House that the videos he retweeted which Fransen had shared are totally verified and possibly fake. They were entitled things like ‘Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death’, ‘Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!’ and ‘Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches’. There is one word for this sort of content: propaganda.
Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, defended his decision to retweet the videos. ‘Whether it is a real video, the threat is real’ she said ‘that is what the President is talking about, that is what the President is focussed on is dealing with those real threats, and those are real no matter how you look at it’. If the videos are fake and portray fake acts, is the threat real? Surely not?
There’s some serious double think going on here. Did the president of the United States just use fake racist propaganda to endorse border control and ‘tough’ immigration policies? Yes, he did and, in doing so, he legitimised racist hatred as part of the political mainstream via the Oval Office. After a divisive and, at times, dog whistling racist campaign from Vote Leave and Leave EU, Britain voted for Brexit. We then saw the largest spike in religious and racial hate crimes ever recorded. That is what happens when political figures endorse hateful rhetoric for their own gain.
It would be fair to say that Theresa May’s rebuke of Trump didn’t go far enough. Perhaps that doesn’t matter because he didn’t take her seriously anyway. Following May’s critical statement Trump tweeted:
Hilariously, he tweeted the wrong Theresa May first time around and managed to tag @thetheresamay who is a woman from Sussex with six followers. She is currently understood to be awaiting an apology.
And so, we end the week like this: nobody with any influence or power seems prepared to openly ask the president of the United States to delete tweets in which he appears to promote a racist, far-right and white nationalist group. Nor is anyone officially cancelling Trump’s latent state visit, they're just hinting that it has been delayed. Trump owes Theresa May an apology, he just doesn’t respect her enough to offer it up.
Donald Trump is not somebody’s mad old relative haphazardly tweeting to his three followers, and it’s dangerous to dismiss him as such. He’s the most powerful man in the world.
What will it take for the British government to stand up to Trump?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.