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- UK officials kept delaying Trump's visit to England after he became president, a new book says.
- He dropped "not-so-subtle hints" for more than a year about making a state visit, but UK officials pretended not to notice, Fiona Hill wrote.
- Each time Trump brought it up, British PM Theresa May and her colleagues "would pretend not to understand the conversational thrust and change the subject," the book said.
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Former President Donald Trump was obsessed with making a state visit to the UK early on in his presidency and repeatedly brought it up to British officials. But every time he did, they would change the subject or pretend they didn't understand him.
That's according to a new book by Fiona Hill, who served as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council under Trump.
In "There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century," Hill wrote that Trump became fixated on making a state visit after then-British Prime Minister Theresa May visited the White House in January 2017 and "immediately invited" him to the UK.
But British officials kept putting the visit off for the next year or so by "never formally extending the invitation" and "coming up with various excuses about timing," Hill's memoir said.
Trump, a longtime admirer of the UK and the British royal family, became so frustrated by the lack of an invitation that he started "dropping not-so-subtle hints" about making a state visit in "every encounter" he had with May and other British officials.
"In the middle of a meeting or in an obvious tangent at the end, he would, apropos of nothing in particular, suddenly talk about his desire to golf once more at Turnberry," Hill wrote. "May and her colleagues would pretend not to understand the conversational thrust and change the subject."
Behind the scenes, Hill wrote, British officials told American officials that a Trump visit to the UK would be a "political headache" given widespread opposition to him in the country. Trump was at the time in a longrunning feud with London mayor Sadiq Khan, who slammed Trump after he called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" in December 2015.
Hill wrote that when British officials could no longer delay Trump's visit, they suggested that he make a "lesser working visit" during a broader presidential trip to Europe in 2018 that included that year's NATO summit in Brussels and a bilateral meeting in Helsinki with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
"Ten Downing Street evidently hoped that the UK portion of the visit would somehow get lost in the mix if it was sandwiched in between some inevitable blowup over NATO and an overly anticipated and hyped-up encounter between Trump and Putin," Hill wrote.
Indeed, Trump's actions at both the NATO summit and the Putin meeting dominated headlines about his Europe trip that year.
He kicked off his remarks in Brussels by insulting Germany, a key US ally, and calling it a "captive of Russia," while accusing other NATO members of being "delinquent" in their defense spending. In Helsinki, meanwhile, Trump sent shockwaves through the political sphere when he lavished praise on Putin and suggested that he trusted the Russian leader more than US intelligence.
That said, Trump's UK visit didn't go entirely unnoticed. During an hourlong visit to Windsor Castle in July 2018, he briefly walked in front of the queen - a violation of royal protocol - while they inspected her honor guard.
He and then first lady Melania Trump broke royal protocol again the next year, when they shook hands with members of the royal family during a UK visit instead of curtsying and bowing.
source https://www.businessinsider.com/british-officials-kept-delaying-trump-state-visit-fiona-hill-book-2021-10