London Mayor Sadiq Khan has accused Donald Trump of repeatedly criticizing him because of his “ethnicity” and his Muslim faith, comments likely to reignite his long-running feud with the US president-elect.
The two men found themselves embroiled in an extraordinary war of words during Trump’s first presidency, initially sparked by Khan’s speech against the U.S. travel ban on people from certain Muslim countries.
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Trump then accused Khan – the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital when he was first elected in 2016 – of doing a “very poor job on terrorism” and called him a “cold loser” and “very stupid”.
The mayor in turn allowed an unflattering Trump blimp dressed as a baby in a diaper to fly over protests in Parliament Square during his 2018 visit to Britain.
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Speaking on a podcast recorded before Trump’s November 5 re-election and released earlier this week, Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants in Britain, said he considered the fact that he had been targeted in the past as “incredibly personal”.
“If I didn’t have this color of skin, if I wasn’t a practicing Muslim, he wouldn’t have come for me,” he told the High Performance podcast, which interviews figures from different industries.
“He came for me because, let’s be honest, my ethnicity and my religion.”
Khan added that during this period he was “denouncing someone whose policies were sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist” and that he had “a responsibility to speak out.”
His latest comments about Trump stand in stark contrast to those of his British Labor Party colleagues, who brought to power in July.
Several Labor MPs now in senior government posts, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy, criticized Trump while in opposition during his first term in the White House.
In 2018, Lammy called him a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath.” But last week, Britain’s current top diplomat dismissed the remarks as “old news.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared to strive to forge a positive relationship with the president-elect, promptly congratulating him on his “historic election victory”.
Starmer said their phone call was “very positive, very constructive” and that the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US would “thrive” during Trump’s second term.
