British Prime Minister Is Latest To Be Pissed Off at Donald Trump

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The Trumpies just don’t know when to quit:

The White House has tried to soothe an angry Britain after suggesting that President Barack Obama used London’s spy agency to conduct secret surveillance on President Trump while he was a candidate last year.

….Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, spoke with Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to Washington, on Thursday night to try to smooth over the unusual rupture between the United States and its closest international ally. The White House said it would issue a statement later on Friday morning.

The flap started when Mr. Spicer, in the course of defending Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated accusation that Mr. Obama had ordered the future president’s phones tapped last year, read from the White House lectern comments by a Fox News commentator asserting that the British spy agency was involved. Andrew Napolitano, the commentator, said on air that Mr. Obama had used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as the GCHQ, to spy on Mr. Trump.

It’s like I said yesterday: Trump needs to get it through his head that he’s now the president of the United States. It’s not Rosie O’Donnell he’s feuding with anymore. When he tosses off random crap because he’s bored and wants attention—and then refuses to back down because Donald Trump never backs down—he wastes everyone’s time and risks far more than just his own tattered reputation.

The result so far of Trump’s obvious lie is that the Senate is wasting time pretending to investigate; the House is wasting time pretending to investigate; the Justice Department is wasting time responding to the House and Senate; the conservative media is wasting time inventing ever more crap to defend Trump’s original crap; the White House communications shop is wasting time desperately trying to research spin to back up their boss; and the prime minister of Great Britain is pissed off. All because Trump got bored one morning. What a cock-up.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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