President Donald Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders are continuing to cause problems for his administration, apparently. This time, the figure on the other end of the call was the United Kingdom’s current Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’s focused on withdrawing the United Kingdom from the European Union during his comparatively short time in office. Reportedly, a recent phone call between Trump and Johnson ended in Trump angrily hanging up on Johnson, and now — the U.K. leader has indefinitely cancelled a planned trip to the U.S. in which he’d been apparently slated to explore opportunities for a new trade deal.
The U.K.’s exit from the E.U., which was made official only recently after years of delays, provided the spark for that prospective new trade deal. Trump has supported “Brexit,” as the U.K.’s withdrawal has been called, but that apparently was not enough to salvage his relationship with Johnson. Trump’s behavior has grown so egregious that he’s offended a conservative ally.
Business Insider reports:
‘UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has canceled a trip to the US planned for next month after a furious phone call from President Donald Trump in which Trump slammed down the phone on the prime minister. Johnson had been due to visit Washington last month but repeatedly delayed the trip after a series of rows with the president over Iran, Huawei, and a rejected request by the prime minister to extradite the wife of a US diplomat.’
That diplomat’s wife was responsible for a hit and run car crash that killed a young British teen. The specific spark that ignited Trump against Johnson was the U.K.’s plans to use the Chinese tech company Huawei to develop a 5G network for the country. The Trump administration has targeted Chinese companies in general and Huawei in particular with allegations that the company’s tech could serve as a way for Chinese intelligence services to gain access to other countries’ crucial information — and, of course, the situation is complicated by Trump’s apparent personal vendetta against the Chinese.
Apparently, Johnson is now simply planning to meet with Trump on the occasion of the upcoming G7 summit of world leaders in June, which the U.S. will be hosting at Camp David this time around. His team claims that the cancellation was due to his interest in focusing more on domestic matters for the time being.
Using a Lord of the Rings reference, one anonymous source claimed:
‘When the Eye of Sauron is off the Whitehall machine, things stop working. That is why he has stripped down all his foreign travel this year to get his agenda done.’
In other words, even the infamous Boris Johnson doesn’t feel like he has time for Trump’s nonsense.
At this point, Trump has few, if any allies left. He’s opted to criticize longtime U.S. allies like NATO member countries and cozy up to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and North Korea. He claimed at one point that he “fell in love” with the latter’s dictator Kim Jong Un, and that kind of nonsense has defined his time in office at this point.
