LONDON — With relations between the United States and Europe already on edge, President Donald Trump has reignited a feud with London Mayor Sadiq Khan — whom he falsely accused of trying to impose Islamic law in the British capital — calling the London-born mayor “horrible, vicious, disgusting.”
Khan quickly hit back, calling Trump “obsessed” with him, and landed another jab — pointing out that a record number of Americans are moving to live in Britain.
The British government also stepped in to defend Khan, offering a rare rebuke to the U.S. administration, to which it has tried to remain aligned despite Trump’s political — and temperamental — unpredictability.
The war of words between Trump and Khan unfolded mainly in Politico, which published an interview with Trump this week in which he called the left-leaning Muslim mayor — who is of British Pakistani heritage — a “horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor” and claimed that London is a “different place” than it once was.
“I love London. … I hate to see it happen,” Trump said in the interview, noting that “my roots are in Europe.” Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his paternal grandfather emigrated from Germany.
Asked for a response, Khan told Politico that Trump is “obsessed” with him, and he noted the irony of Americans flocking to Britain.
“London is becoming a different place,” Khan said, turning Trump’s phrase. “We are the greatest city in the world.”
He added, “I suspect that’s one of the reasons why we have record numbers of Americans coming here to holiday, coming here to live, coming here to invest or coming here to study.”
The British government generally has been reticent to publicly criticize the Trump administration. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Downing Street had denied that it was failing to back Khan and insisted that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had strong relationships with both men.
By Wednesday, Downing Street’s position sharpened. Starmer’s spokesperson told reporters that “those comments are wrong.”
“The mayor of London is doing an excellent job in London, delivering free school meals in primary schools, cleaning up London’s air with the world’s largest clean air zone and starting record numbers of council houses,” the spokesperson said. “The prime minister is hugely proud of the mayor of London’s record and proud to call him a colleague and a friend.”
Cabinet ministers echoed the defense.
Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, said that Khan was “doing an excellent job for all of London.”
Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, told Sky News that Trump’s characterization of Khan was “wrong.” Nandy added: “Sadiq is doing an incredibly good job for London. We are proud of our mayors.”
Trump and Khan have clashed for years, most loudly during Trump’s first term.
Moments before his plane touched down in Britain for his first state visit in 2019, Trump took to social media to call Khan a “stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London.” Khan’s spokesperson dismissed the remarks as “childish insults.”
Earlier this year in a speech at the United Nations, Trump claimed that London wanted to “go to sharia law.” Khan responded, calling Trump “racist,” “sexist,” “misogynistic” and “Islamophobic.”
Appearing alongside Starmer at a news conference in Scotland this summer, Trump called Khan a “nasty” person, prompting the prime minister to interject — “He’s a friend of mine, actually.”
Britain has been more cautious in its response to the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, which warned that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.”
On Tuesday, a Downing Street spokesperson declined to engage with the document’s most provocative claims, saying that it was a “strategy devised by the U.S. for the U.S. It is for them to comment on.”
During Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament, Ed Davey, the leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, pressed Starmer about the “deeply alarming” strategy, noting it “repeats far-right tropes of ‘civilizational erasure’” and warns that the U.S. government will “cultivate resistance in Europe.”
Davey urged Starmer to “pick up the phone and make it clear to President Trump that any attempts to interfere with our democracy are totally unacceptable.”
Starmer replied: “What I see is a strong Europe, united behind Ukraine … and united behind our long-standing values of freedom and democracy, and I will always stand up for those values and those freedoms.”
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