What the Trump-Sadiq spat tells us about modern politics

My favourite feud is back on. It’s Donald Trump vs Sadiq Khan. The wisecracking American president vs London’s pipsqueak mayor. The brash Yank voted into power by 77million souls bored rigid with elite opinion and the woke irritant in City Hall who embodies elite opinion. He’s a ‘nasty man’, said Trump of his old foe on Monday, re-igniting their bitchy spat that’s been rolling for nearly 10 years now. And I’m here for it.

It was while he was holding court at his luxury resort of Trump Turnberry in Scotland that Trump took yet another swipe at Sadiq. After playing a round of golf he had Keir Starmer over for a gab and some tea. Trump let rip. Wind turbines are crap, he said. They’re ‘ugly monsters’, they’re ‘made in China’ and they ‘kill the birds’. Even the Guardian had to admit a lot of this was true in its haughty rolling ‘fact-checking’ of the president.

He called on a visibly squirming Sir Keir to cut taxes and sort out the migrant crisis. He suggested he start fracking for gas in Aberdeen. He even seemed to hit on Starmer’s wife. ‘She’s very… she’s a great woman’, he said. ‘I don’t want to say more, I’ll get myself in trouble.’ Dude. The next day he doubled down on his bemusement at Britain’s embrace of the End Days cult of Net Zero. Starmer, he said, should be throwing open that ‘TREASURE CHEST’ of oil and gas in the North Sea and bringing down ‘energy costs for the people!’. He’s not wrong.

But it was his pop at Sadiq that got even robotic Starmer limply waving a manicured hand in vague protest. At Turnberry a reporter asked Trump if he’ll be visiting London. Trump, of course, has not once heard the word London without instantly thinking of its rubbish mayor. ‘I’m not a fan of your mayor’, he said. ‘I think he’s done a terrible job.’ Then the jibe: he’s a ‘nasty person’. Starmer stiffly intervened. ‘He’s a friend of mine’, he said, gingerly, in that lawyerly nasal whine, further proof that he’s the last man in Britain you’d want on your side in a fight at a pub.

Look, it’s true that it is not very diplomatic for a foreign leader to come here and bash our elected representatives. Even Sadiq Khan. Though I bet the Venn diagram of commentators slamming Trump for poking his nose into our affairs and commentators who praised Barack Obama when he warned Brits not to vote for Brexit is a perfect circle. The thing is, though, we’re crying out for some sweet respite from the sheer beige joylessness of Starmer’s government – and if Trump’s willing to provide it, I’ll take it.

Besides, Khan has said worse things during their digital quarrel. He once said Trump’s language echoes that of ‘the fascists of the 20th century’. ‘The far right is on the rise around the world’, he said in 2019, and Trump is ‘one of the most egregious examples of [this] growing threat’. What’s worse – calling someone nasty or calling them a Nazi? At least Trump keeps his insults within the normal bounds of dissing, whereas Sadiq cynically marshals the worst horrors of history to defame a president elected by millions of our American cousins as Hitler 2.0. Trump might trample on diplomacy, but Khan tramples on truth.

The feud has a childish bent, of course. Who can forget when Khan got the Trump-bashers of the lame left squealing with glee by giving the green light to the Trump baby blimp – that huge inflatable caricature of Trump as a snarling orange baby that flew over London during his visit here in 2018? A year later, as Air Force One was about to touch down in London, Trump tweeted that Khan is a ‘stone cold loser’ who ‘reminds me very much of our very dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, [Bill] de Blasio… only half his height’. Khan fired back, calling Trump a ‘six-foot-three child’. Hmm, not as funny, Sadiq.

Yet for all the pantomime daftness of this decade-long clash, it also shines a light, if a weird, distorting one, on where the West is at. These men speak to the two big strains in modern politics. It’s the noisily anti-globalist president vs a London mayor who’s more comfortable quaffing non-alcoholic beverages with the gold-collared superclass of Davos than he is mingling with London’s plebs. Trump bristles at supranational institutions, Sadiq loves them: witness his ongoing emotional breakdown over our vote for Brexit.

Trump wants to ‘drill, baby, drill’, while Sadiq dreams of making London a ‘carbon-neutral city’. This teeming metropolis with its nine million souls? Good luck with that! Trump hates woke, Sadiq loves it. Trump even knows what a woman is. A woman is an ‘adult human female’, he said in an executive order in January, and a girl is a ‘juvenile human female’. Sadiq meanwhile, in the fashion of those high-status jerk circles he mingles in, remains bamboozled by biology. ‘Trans women are women, trans men are men’, he once tweeted, every word post-truth balderdash.

You don’t have to be a fan of Trump to think he was right to say Sadiq’s done a ‘terrible job’ in London. Or, more importantly, to recognise that there are many, many Londoners who align more with the president’s post-woke cockiness than they do with Sadiq’s lame, PC, eco-meek blather. No doubt Khan is plotting a spicy comeback to Trump’s ‘nasty’ jibe, blissfully unaware that across the capital there are people who prefer the troll in the White House to the troll in City Hall.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy