US President Donald Trump has again taken aim at Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, delivering a scathing three-point put-down. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, June 24, Trump said: "You have a terrible Mayor of London. Your Mayor of London is grossly incompetent, a bad person and a horrible representative for your country."
Long-running feud reignited
The feud between Trump and Sir Sadiq Khan dates back more than a decade. The pair first began exchanging political jabs in 2015, a year before Khan took office as Mayor of London in 2016. In 2017, Khan branded Trump's tweets as "ill-informed" after the US leader criticised the mayor's response to the London Bridge van attack, which killed seven people and injured dozens.
During his first state visit to the UK in 2019, Trump referred to Khan as a "stone cold loser" before dining with the late Queen Elizabeth II.
UN address sparks latest exchange
Trump's latest comments came after Khan responded to a public attack during a UN address a day earlier. Addressing the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Trump claimed illegal immigrants had overrun continental Europe and the United Kingdom. He singled out Khan, saying: "I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it's 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."
Khan, the first Muslim to hold the position of Mayor of London, said Trump's comments spoke to his "Islamophobic" ideologies. In response to the UN address, Khan stated: "I think President Trump has shown he is racist, he is sexist, he is misogynistic, he is Islamophobic."
Death threats surged after Trump's election
Separately, Khan revealed that death threats against him rose by 2,000% after Trump was first elected president. Speaking to Republica, he said: "It's never nice having death threats and requiring police protection. We did some analysis and when President Trump got elected, the amount of threats I received went up 2,000 percent. When he was elected the second time, it's gone up by 100 percent."
Khan also said he had no idea why Trump was obsessed with the leadership of London.
