If you want to see just how entitled and arrogant Britain’s chattering classes have become, look no further than their indignation over Donald Trump’s tweets calling London mayor Sadiq Khan a ‘stone cold loser’ and mocking his diminutive stature. Trump posted his Sadiqphobic tweets (I’m amazed the PC set hasn’t started using the word ‘Sadiqphobia’ yet) as Air Force One was readying to land in London.
The tweets were an outrage against morality, decency, diplomacy and the United Kingdom itself, the hissy-fit-havers insist. ‘How dare Trump attack the lovely, progressive Sadiq?’, they cry in unison, as they accuse the orange oaf they love to loathe of demeaning the office of the president, weakening the special relationship, and coarsening public discourse.
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There’s only one problem with their self-satisfied flapping over Trump’s online namecalling – Sadiq started it! He was the first name-caller in this ridiculous, teenage Twitterspat. He likened Trump to fascists. In a national newspaper. On Sunday, the day before Trump came to the UK. Sadiq’s crystal-clear intention was to cause a diplomatic stink and start a virtual scrap that might win him some brownie points in the interminable battle over who will get to animate the corpse of the Labour Party once Jeremy Corbyn vacates this macabre office. And anyone who has ever braved a rowdy playground, had a lively night out or even just had a normal job will know that you can’t go around dishing out insults without getting a bit of blowback. Where the hell did these people grow up?
The UK media depicts Trump as a big baby. (When they’re not depicting him as literally Hitler, that is. How telling that they can’t decide if he’s an overgrown child or the reincarnation of the most evil man in human history.) That Trump baby blimp will fly over London today, as part of the anti-Trump protests, with the official blessing of Sadiq Khan, of course. But in this spat, it isn’t Trump who’s behaving like a baby – it’s Sadiq.
Sadiq has done the equivalent of starting a playground scrap and then running to teacher to say ‘Miss, he called me a name!’ when the person he picked a scrap with fired insults back at him. It’s pathetic. What Sadiq said about Trump in the Observer – that his actions are like those of the ‘European dictators of the 1930s and 40s’ and that he is the figurehead of a ‘global far-right movement’ that is ‘using the same divisive tropes of the fascists of the 20th century’ – is far worse than what Trump said about Sadiq in return. Sadiq likened Trump to the people who destroyed Europe and murdered and gassed to death millions of Jews; Trump called Sadiq a midget. I’m saying Sadiq got off very lightly here.
