BRANCHBURG, N.J. – President Donald Trump is considering scrapping or postponing a planned visit to Britain later this year amid a billowing backlash over comments he made after the recent terrorist attack in London, two administration officials said.
Trump has recently expressed increasing skepticism to aides about the trip after coming under intense criticism for a misleading charge he leveled against London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The visit was originally scheduled as part of a trip to Europe next month. Then it was tentatively penciled in for the fall. National Security Council and State Department officials were working on the details but had not taken the usual "preadvance" trip to work out the specific logistics, said a person familiar with the situation.
Trump, who was visiting his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., over the weekend, has not definitively ruled out going, the officials said.
One factor leading to his reluctance, said one of the officials, is his preference for having foreign leaders visit him — not the other way around.
But optics and politics are major considerations, too. Trump is deeply unpopular in Britain, and any visit by him — let alone a state visit with all its pomp — would probably be met with wide-scale protests. Recent polls have found that more than half of the British public views Trump as a threat to global stability.
New York Times
