[Washington Examiner] Leaked secret cables reveal messages from the United Kingdom's ambassador to the United States making disparaging comments about President Trump.
Sir Kim Darroch, one of the U.K.'s most senior diplomats, referred to the president with several unflattering adjectives, including "inept" and "incompetent," according to cables published by the Daily Mail. "For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity," Darroch also said.
In other messages from the ambassador meant to be seen only by the British government, Darroch, 65, was deeply critical of Trump's administration and legacy. In one missive, Darroch said, "We don't really believe this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept."
Darroch, a former British ambassador to the European Union who was his country's national security adviser before being sent to Washington, has been in post since January 2016. He was expected to leave Washington and retire at the end of this year ‐ though that may now be brought forward.
After he was elected president, Trump made clear he would like to see Brexit leader Nigel Farage take Darroch's place. The timing of the leak is particularly unfortunate for Darroch because Boris Johnson, who has made plain his admiration for Trump, is poised to become British prime minister this summer.
Many of the messages, which span the entirety of Trump's presidency thus far, suggest trouble in the White House and specifically related to infighting between members of the administration. Darroch said Trump's entire life had been "mired in scandal." He also suggested to those who might deal with the president "you need to make your points simple, even blunt."
Although Darroch expressed was highly of Trump, he urged British leaders "not write him off," saying "that it was still possible that Trump would "emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator." Darroch also suggested that Trump had a "credible path" to being reelected in 2020.
After Trump's recent visit to the U.K., Darroch cautioned London that they might be "flavour of the month" for the president and "This is still the land of America First."
The ambassador additionally criticized Trump's ability to follow through on promises made during his presidential campaign. "Of the main campaign promises, not an inch of the Wall has been built; the executive orders on travel bans from Muslim countries have been blocked by the state courts; tax reform and the infrastructure package have been pushed into the middle distance; and the repeal and replacement of Obamacare is on a knife edge," he said.
Darroch skewered Trump's response to the attacks against two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and the shooting-down of a U.S. Navy drone, for which the U.S. has blamed Iran. "Its unlikely that US policy on Iran is going to become more coherent any time soon. This is a divided Administration," the diplomat said. He also said of Trump's 11th-hour decision not to carry out a retaliatory strike against Iran, "It's more likely that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look come 2020."
Of the allegations that Trump could have colluded with the Russian government to get elected, Darroch said before the Mueller investigation concluded that "the worst cannot be ruled out" and that Trump's White House has been "dogged from day one by stories of vicious infighting and chaos inside the White House, and swamped by scandals ‐ all, one way or another, linked to Russia."
Unusually, the British Foreign Office distanced itself from Darroch in a statement, indicating that his judgments of Trump, which are widely shared at the top of the British government, were his own. "The British public would expect our Ambassadors to provide Ministers with an honest, unvarnished assessment of the politics in their country," a statement said.