The US embassy, peanuts and Africa: Donald Trump’s week
Despite our best efforts, it’s nearly impossible not to cover what Donald Trump has done at least once a month, if only to highlight the ludicrous situation that a country like the USA finds itself in.
In a series of truly bizarre Tweets, President Trump announced that he was cancelling his trip to London to open the new US embassy, moved from Mayfair to Nine Elms, south of the Thames, due to him perceiving the move as a ‘bad deal’.
The Tweet read "Reason I cancelled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for 'peanuts', only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!"
Sadly Trump can’t be tried for crimes to the English language but it is somewhat easier to simply use a search engine to find out that the Obama administration had absolutely nothing to do with the US Embassy move, which was in fact organised by George W Bush 3 months before Obama came to office.
On the embassy web page about the project, it said: "The project has been funded entirely by the proceeds of the sale of other US Government properties in London, not through appropriated funds."
Not content with being widely outed as a liar for repeating his £350 million a week for the NHS, Boris Johnson decided to wade in after Sadiq Khan, London mayor, had expressed his pleasure that the President had ‘got the message that he wasn’t welcome’. Deciding to play his usual card of using outdated and pointlessly insulting language, the Foreign Secretary accused Khan of being a "puffed up pompous popinjay”.
It is not known if Johnson tweeted this before or after hearing the news that Trump had allegedly called an entire continent and two other countries of being ‘Shitholes’, which is a sentence that I, like so many others writing about this, never expected to have to describe whilst writing about a sitting US president.
In a meeting with Republican and Democrat senators at the White House regarding the deal struck to fund his border wall in return for granting residency to poor immigrant children, Trump is alleged to have made the remark when describing Africa, Haiti and El Salvador, all of whom had refugees accepted after recent natural disasters.
According to an aide, when the group came to discussing immigration from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador, Trump asked why America would want immigrants from "all these shithole countries" and that the U.S. should have more people coming in from places like Norway.
The comments have been interpreted by almost everybody as a way of saying that only white immigrants are welcome in the US, and have been met with almost universal disgust.
The FT reported Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecoms billionaire who has championed the cause of good governance in Africa with a $5m annual prize, as saying “He is normalising obscenity, chauvinism and racism. What worries us is how the US — which is supposed to be built on ideals — is losing its position as leader of the world, and the backbone of international order.”
The UN human rights spokesman, Rupert Colville, told a Geneva news briefing: “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”
Sadly, there seems to be little in the way of remorse or even an apology forthcoming from the Whitehouse or its press team. Trump has since denied using the term on his Twitter account, but it seems roughly nobody believes him.
