Trump simply does not like London’s mayor Sir Sadiq Khan. The US President once again reignited his long-running feud with Khan on Monday, during his four-day informal summer visit to the UK.
Trump derided Khan publicly in front of UK’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer calling him a “nasty person”. Further adding that he’s not a fan of Khan and thinks he’s doing a terrible job. Starmer tried to step in for Khan, calling him a friend but Trump powered through.
Most people would have taken the petty route but not Khan. In response, a spokesperson for London’s mayor said Sir Khan was “delighted that President Trump wants to come to the greatest city in the world.” Further adding that, in London,Trump would get to see how diversity makes the city “stronger not weaker; richer, not poorer”.
So, why does Trump have a beef with the three-time London mayor?
Trump has been feuding with Khan since before his first run at the US presidency. Khan had called out Trump for being “ignorant” when it came to his views on Islam and its followers.
For context - Trump had proposed to ban all Muslims from entering the US during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Khan hoped Trump would lose the 2016 presidential elections because he claimed a Trump victory would make both the US and the UK less safe.
As we all know, Trump is not one to take criticism well. Following those remarks, Trump, in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, challenged Khan to an IQ test. He further declared that he doesn’t care about him but called Khan’s statement rude. And then came the warning - he would remember those statements.
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In June 2017, London was in mourning after eight people were killed, and many more injured. Three attackers had ploughed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge. The attackers then launched a knife attack in nearby Borough Market.
Trump took this as an opportunity to attack the London mayor. He laid the blame squarely on Khan’s shoulders after he linked the attack to the rise in immigration levels under Khan specifically. Khan hit back and said that though there has been an increase in violent crime across England and Wales, including London, he didn’t believe immigration to be the cause.
David Lammy, the current UK Foreign Secretary, came to Khan’s defence in a series of tweets. Lammy called Trump a racist saying the US President hated the fact that “London chose a Muslim mayor”.
The following year, Londoners were protesting the US leader’s controversial visit to the UK and wanted to let fly a giant orange-hued “Trump Baby” clutching a mobile phone, one sporting a giant diaper, over Britain’s Houses of Parliament. London Mayor Sadiq Khan gave the unusual request the go-ahead after more than 10,000 people signed a petition for the same.
But a defiant and possibly hurt Trump insisted that they liked him in the UK. He added that Britons shared his concerns on immigration, claiming that’s why Brexit happened.
Fast forward to 2019 and Khan had authored an op-ed in the Observer ahead of Trump’s three-day state visit to the UK. Khan compared the language used by the US President to that of the “fascists of the 20th century.” He called Trump “one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat”.
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In typical fashion, Trump took to Twitter (now called X) to criticise the mayor who had just been re-elected. In the post, he called him a “stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London”. Moreover he claimed Khan had been “foolishly nasty to the most important ally of the United Kingdom”.
Khan though isn’t one to back down. In 2024, in an interview with The High Performance podcast, he was asked about his long-running feud with Trump, and the reason for the vitriol.
Khan believed that Trump was repeatedly coming after him because of his ethnicity and religion. He pointed out that it was an incredibly personal attack that even affected his family. Khan insisted that he had a responsibility to speak out against the sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and racist policies of the leader of the Free World. Because it not only affected him, his family or Londoners, it affected everyone.
