Labor Mayor of London Sadiq Khan accused US President-elect Donald Trump of attacking him during his first term (2017-2021) because of his “skin color” and his Muslim religion.
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Speaking in a podcast released this week but recorded before the US election on November 5, Mr Khan added that he “stood out against someone whose policies were sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and racist”.
The relationship between the two men has always been marked by tensions.
In 2019, the American president said that Mr. Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital, was doing “a very bad job on terrorism” and called him a “total loser”.
For his part, the Labor councilor, son of Pakistani immigrants, had accused Trump of “hard-right populism”, before giving his approval to the presence of a huge inflatable baby bearing the likeness of the American president in a demonstration in London in June 2019.
In the “High Performance” podcast, he returned to the attacks he had been subjected to by Donald Trump.
“If I wasn’t that color of skin, if I wasn’t a practicing Muslim, he wouldn’t have come after me,” he said.
“This affects me and my family. But what concerns me is not me and my family. What worries me is that he is the leader of the free world,” he continued.
His latest comments on the president-elect contrast with the line of the British Labor Party. Prime Minister Keir Starmer quickly congratulated Donald Trump on his “historic electoral victory”.
The head of government also insisted that his telephone call with the Republican had been “very positive, very constructive” and assured that the “special” relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States would “prosper” over the course of of Donald Trump’s second term.
