Donald Trump and the wrath of Khan

NEW YORK — What would Winston Churchill have made of the public pissing match between Donald Trump and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London? When the old British bulldog coined the phrase “special relationship” in 1944, it was to describe the ties between an imperial Britain of eroding stature and an America poised to take emphatic charge of the Western world. The idea flattered the United Kingdom with apparent equality, but in truth, the relationship made his country a ward of the United States — for most of postwar history in the nicest possible way.

Today, that special relationship seems to be greatly strained. In a series of tweets and ripostes on Twitter and the media, the American president and London’s mayor have engaged in a war of words that has been quite remarkable — and in Trump’s case venomous. The dispute climaxed on Tuesday when Khan called on the British government to cancel Trump’s forthcoming state visit. “I don’t think we should roll out the red carpet” to Trump “in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for,” he said.

Khan’s indignation is shared by many in the U.K. In the hours after the terror attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market on June 3, Trump tweeted his disparagement of London’s security efforts, while also cynically misquoting its mayor. When Khan’s office pointed out Trump’s misrepresentation of his words, the president hit back by tweeting that Khan’s was a “pathetic excuse.”

People observe a minutes silence near the scene of Saturday’s terrorist attack, on June 6, 2017 in London | Carl Court/Getty Images

Britons with living memories of past American presidents have been startled by Trump’s attack on the mayor of London at a time when the city was “reeling” — to quote a New York Times headline that was widely, and deservedly, pilloried. The morally upright Carter, the avuncular Reagan, the courtly George H.W. Bush, the folksy Clinton, the gregarious George W. Bush, the eloquent Obama — all of them, to be sure, would have responded to Britain’s grief with vigorous words of support and offers of assistance. They would have invoked the special relationship.

Not Trump. He did nothing of the sort — at least not publicly. London is renowned for its resilience in the face of calamity, and yet, in the bloodied minutes and hours after the attack, civic morale was at a desperate ebb. For the president of Britain’s closest ally to resort to recrimination as his first response was, to Britons, an incomprehensible experience. Had an occupant of the White House ever said anything as unseemly, as uncouth, as devoid of empathy and humanity?

Bafflement quickly gave way to anger as Trump showed no signs of remorse. It was left to Lewis Lukens, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in London — Trump has yet to put an ambassador in place — to soothe inflamed British public opinion. “I commend the strong leadership of the mayor of London as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,” he tweeted. The tweet was sent from @USAInUK, the embassy’s Twitter account, but Lukens bravely added his own signature to the text.

Lukens is a career foreign service officer, not a political appointee. Before moving to London, he was ambassador to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. He is a Princeton graduate and has a Master’s degree from that university’s Woodrow Wilson School. His father was U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Congo. He is an American with diplomacy in his veins, a man who understands the special relationship — rhetoric and all. I am willing to wager that this was the first time in his 28 years of service at the State Department that he has had to atone publicly, on behalf of his country, for an ad hominem insult hurled against a senior elected official of an allied country by the president of the United States.

London is renowned for its resilience in the face of calamity, and yet, in the bloodied minutes and hours after the attack, civic morale was at a desperate ebb.

Mayor Khan is too smart a man to miss a trick, and he reached for the special relationship in his last utterance on Trump. He used a demotic phrase (“mate”) to strike a chord with British public opinion: “When you have a special relationship, it is no different from when you have got a close mate. You stand with them in times of adversity but you call them out when they are wrong. There are many things about which Donald Trump is wrong.”

Khan isn’t alone in his assessment. There are many in Britain today who worry that the special relationship is fraying badly at precisely the wrong time — just as Britain readies itself for life outside the European Union. It is worth remembering that Trump wasn’t president when Britain voted for Brexit.

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The Anglo-American “special relationship” is one of history’s more durable diplomatic clichés. It has survived some turbulent episodes that might have tested an alliance with weaker rhetorical foundations. It survived the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Eisenhower made the British (and French) end their attempt to seize the canal by force. It was also undamaged by Britain’s refusal to send troops to Vietnam; the American invasion of the Commonwealth nation of Grenada in 1983; Bill Clinton’s approval of a U.S. visa for the Irish terrorist Gerry Adams in 1994; and even the removal from the Oval Office under Barack Obama of a bust of Churchill himself.

Ironically, the relocation of Churchill’s bust was the cause of the first spat in history between a London mayor and an American president, when an indignant (and mischief-making) Boris Johnson suggested that Obama had dismissed the statuary from his presence because he was “part-Kenyan” and had “an ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”

These words were used by Johnson as part of an op-ed criticizing Obama for urging Brits to vote against Brexit, of which Johnson was a noisy advocate. Johnson believed that not even the special relationship allowed the U.S. president to interfere — as he saw it — in the internal affairs of Britain.

Unlike the present spat between Trump and Khan, the Johnson-Obama kerfuffle never did more than flare up briefly on the opinion pages of newspapers and on TV talk shows. President Obama did not take the mayor’s bait, preferring — quaintly — to behave in a presidential way and take no notice of the controversy.

British Prime Minister Theresa May (left) and US President Donald Trump meet beside a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Oval Office of the White House on January 27, 2017 in Washington, D.C. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The present dispute was, in contrast, started by Trump. Given its context — the apportioning of blame in the aftermath of a terrorist attack — it would have been politically impossible for Khan to remain silent.

Besides, Khan is a mayor. Mayors respond to verbal aggression; mayors engage in political dust-ups. It is part of the small-bore nature of mayoral politics. It has often struck me that Trump governs the U.S. as if he were the country’s mayor, not its president. No issue is too small, or too picayune, for him to ignore; no slight is too inconsequential not to transcend. His is the very mayoral politics of handshakes and long-held grudges, and his Manichean methods have the flavor of City Hall, not the White House.

Khan troubles Trump spiritually. He cannot comprehend him as a political type. Khan is a devout Muslim who has repeatedly spoken out against radical Islam. He is a bus driver’s son who is the precise example of the integrated Muslim that many in the West clamor for in this age of Islamism and religious separatists. He is the mayor of the world’s most important city (alongside New York) and his popularity has soared after his brushes with Trump, whose inability to digest the existence of a mainstream Muslim politician in Britain is a result of his instinctive dismissal of Muslims as a people of civic consequence.

Khan is also one of the few leaders with any real heft in the Labour Party, and there is no doubt that his call to rescind Trump’s invitation to the U.K. was made, in part, to put the Tory government in an awkward position in the very brief time that’s left before the general election. Labour feels it can win votes by standing up to Trump, and Trump is doing his best, it would appear, to make that feeling seem rational.

In truth, there’s a point at which Trump needs to stop electioneering, playing to the gallery, and start making America’s alliances work to elicit practical results. Even if Trump feels that his goals or methods diverge from those of his partners abroad, he won’t get anywhere by berating them in public (the way he did Khan). Doing so suggests that he’s talking over the heads of foreign leaders, and trying to arouse local opposition. In effect, he’s electioneering across continents and interfering with the internal affairs of democratic allies.

He will find that there is no surer way to fail than this, if he needs to forge a unified front against the transnational threat of Islamic terror. He will find, also, that he has trashed the special relationship.

Tunku Varadarajan, a contributing editor at POLITICO, is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.