Donald Trump has taken to the United Nations to show how pointless Britain’s courting of the US president with a state visit really was.
Speaking at the UN’s annual general assembly, he told world leaders that London is heading for sharia law and issued all-too-clippable rallying cries for far-right extremists in Europe.
Sir Keir Starmer’s enlistment of King Charles III in a charm offensive with carriage rides around Windsor, state dinners and three days of non-stop flattery delivered nothing but anti-British ranting and un-British extremism.
Mr Trump raged: “Look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s so been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country.
“You can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe. If something is not done immediately, they cannot this cannot be sustained.”
Yes, the 47th president of the United States said that. He was so shielded from real Londoners that he didn’t set foot on the soil of the capital, but was flown from the US territory of the American ambassador’s residence to Windsor Castle less than a fortnight ago.
Still, he’s echoing the nonsense peddled by Oval Office insiders who constantly refer to London having no-go areas, and his friend Elon Musk, who claims the UK is on the brink of civil war.
The views are nonsense. Crime is lower than it has been for a generation in London. But Mr Trump’s views will be clipped up and circulated by right-wing agitators, and one can bet Nigel Farage, as evidence that Britain is being overwhelmed.
Before mentioning the name of London, Mr Trump said: “I’m not mentioning names. I see it, and I can call every single one of them out. You’re destroying your countries. They’re being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble.
“They’ve been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe. Nobody is ever and nobody’s doing anything to change it, to get them out. It’s not sustainable, and because they choose to be politically correct, they’re doing just absolutely nothing about it.”
His address to the UN included statistics from the Council of Europe’s study on Europe’s prison system.
“…in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72 per cent of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland,” he said.
“In 2024 almost 50 per cent of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants in Austria, the number was 53 per cent of the people in prisons were from places that weren’t from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54 per cent.”
He didn’t mention that the European average percentage of foreign nationals in prisons is, according to the same source, 25 per cent. Or that the arrest and conviction rates among foreigners is almost always higher, everywhere.
It’s the clips that count. Social media will churn this stuff with the help of Russian bot farms to reinforce widespread anxiety around immigration across Europe.
Vladimir Putin would be delighted. He wants to see Europe’s right rise. Movements like the UK’s reform and France’s National Front have often been pro-Kremlin and anti-Europe.
He’d be equally delighted by Mr Trump’s continued attack on multilateralism. The imperfect, inefficient, and often incompetent UN has been a global forum since World War II.
It has failed as a body to stop genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Gaza. It has always reflected the competing interests of its five permanent security council members: the UK, France, the US, Russia and China.
Yet it has also woven a system of international laws which have probably kept the world from falling into Darwinian chaos by offering a route out of conflict.
Mr Trump doesn’t like or respect it, and neither do far-right campaigners.
“What’s the purpose of the United Nations? The UN has such tremendous potential. I’ve always said it, it has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential for the most part,” said the US president.
He has cut the UN’s funding from the US from over $1 billion a year to $300 million, supported Israel’s efforts to chuck it out of Gaza, and protected Mr Putin from international condemnation in the UN.
He railed against the UK and others which have recently recognised the state of Palestine and called it a reward for Hamas terror. The recognition specifically condemns Hamas.
But he was not appealing to UN delegates and heads of government – he is going over their heads and fomenting the Israeli canard that Hamas and (its enemy) the Palestinian Liberation Organisation are the same thing. The latter has already acknowledged the right of Israel to exist.
But there was one truth. As Mr Trump said, it’s daft for Europe to be backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia and then being a massive importer of the Kremlin’s fossil fuels which fund its war.
He added: “Inexcusably, even Nato countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products…Think of it, they’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
According to the Centre for Research in Energy and Clean Air, the five biggest importers of Russian fuel to the EU paid the Kremlin €1.1 billion in fees in July alone.
Europe has bought €260 billion worth of Russian fuel since 2022, compared to the €250 billion it’s given Ukraine in military and civilian aid.
“You’re right there, and Europe has to step it up. They can’t be doing what they’re doing. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia,” Mr Trump said.
And here, the president used enough truth to make the rest of his incredible claims credible.
