In 2016, the New York Times published a comprehensive list of Donald Trump’s most disparaging remarks. The article, updated in 2019, was entitled “The 598 People, Places and Things Donald Trump has Insulted on Twitter”, and there is a complete, A to Z list of those who have been on the receiving end of both the casual disdain and studied hostility of America’s two-time President.
That was years ago, so surely, the list must run to more than 1,000 by now, and, in the past 24 hours or so, it has been expanded to include Andy Burnham, the City of Manchester, liberals everywhere, the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan. There is nothing new in his contempt for the outgoing British Prime Minister – “no Winston Churchill” – or the Mayor of London – “an incompetent guy” – but Burnham provides him with a fresh target.
There is a particular and dispiriting register to Trump’s scorn for those he deems unworthy, and Burnham got the full treatment during a press conference in the Oval Office yesterday. When asked by a British journalist what the “new incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham” should do to improve UK-US relations, Trump goes into his best this-is-so-far-beneath-me mode. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “I see he was, I guess, the mayor of a [slight pause for effect]…town. I hear he is extremely liberal… Extremely. So that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea.”
Trump is then asked whether he would want to be the first person on the new prime minister’s list of people to visit. “No,” came the easy response. “I think we are probably of a different persuasion. He’s very liberal.” He then went on to say that he “got along well with Starmer”, despite the fact that “I disagree with him. I told him you have two problems – immigration and energy. And crime.”
He then launched a vicious ad hominem attack on Khan – “a bad person and a terrible representative of your country” – before adding that “the UK is dying”. So, within Trump’s lexicon of abuse, Burnham, who recently referred to American politics as “polarized” and “poisonous” got off quite lightly.
More than that, at a time when he is trying to establish his character to the British people, it will certainly help Burnham’s cause that he is defined as someone antithetical to a US President who, according to YouGov, is disliked by 65 per cent of British people. And if you now polled Mancunians – whose city, one of the fastest-growing in Europe, was belittled as a “town” – you’d probably get a 100 per cent disapproval rating. To be dumped on by Trump is not to be diminished. When measured against public opinion, it is a clear boost to one’s own popularity, and indeed self-esteem.
So, in some ways, this is unalloyed good news for Burnham, who can only gain from the situation. When Tony Blair came in to power in 1997, one of his main imperatives was to demonstrate that a Labour prime minister could work effectively with a Republican (George W Bush) in the White House. The war in Iraq was a distinctly negative aspect of how close the special relationship became at that time, but clearly it serves Britain well when exchanges between the two nations over trade and defence, for example, are, at the very least, cordial.
Burnham will have two more years of Trump in the White House, so he had better work out a way in which, from this most inauspicious start, he can adopt the persona of statesman. Where Keir Starmer spent his time in No 10 trying to manage Trump — flattery here, careful silence there, the occasional wince swallowed for presentational purposes — Burnham has simply said what he thinks. He should continue to do so, knowing that this will play extremely well with his domestic audience. And, what’s more, he should let the latest broadside from the White House pass with an indifferent shrug, treating it as the gift that will keep on giving.
A man with a global audience and no idea who Burnham actually is has given reasons to like him. He’s a liberal – for many people, this doesn’t exactly qualify as a derogatory term – and he’s known as a mayor. Just look up his record.
Most important, he’s now in the growing catalogue of people, places and things that Trump has insulted, and we can be pretty sure that history will judge this not as a curse, but instead as a badge of honour.
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