Donald Trump slammed a home office minister last night after he heard how she had criticised him and his anti-immigration rhetoric.
Angela Eagle said the former US president and Republican nominee was responsible for an “astonishing” level of “vitriol” which has influenced sentiment across the West.
When asked about her remarks on Tuesday, Trump’s campaign spokesperson Steve Cheung told POLITICO: “Nobody knows who this random person is or cares what comes out of her mouth.
“Who is she and what does she do?”
According to The Guardian, the minister told Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool on Monday that it was hard for new immigrants to “rise above the constant drumbeat of toxic anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become emboldened, not only in Britain but across the Western countries.”
Speaking in her role as the minister for illegal immigration, she continued: “Trump does the same. If you look at some of the memes that he’s using with the wall stuff at the moment, it’s astonishing, quite the level of vitriol that it has created.”
Eagle’s words clash with the new government’s attempts to smooth over relations between Labour and a potential second Trump administration, especially as polls show the Republican nominee and his rival, vice president Kamala Harris, are still neck-and-neck.
The new UK government has already faced some tension after anti-Trump comments from the now-foreign secretary David Lammy resurfaced.
And on his Tuesday flight to New York for the UN General Assembly, PM Keir Starmer tried to occupy the middle ground.
He avoided backing Eagle’s anti-Trump comments, instead saying: “I think I’ve been absolutely clear where responsibility lies for the disorder on our streets. It lies with the thugs who were carrying out that disorder. That’s why I took control of the process to ensure that justice was visited very quickly on their cases.”
He added that “it would be very good to meet both” of the presidential candidates while in the US.
Eagle also used her platform on Monday to criticise the Conservatives, saying they were pulled further to the right on the political spectrum because of the electoral threat coming from Reform.
She said: “We had a discourse as the right of the Conservative party got more and more obsessed with what Reform was doing that was very toxic indeed, othering asylum seekers, othering human beings in general, and creating a space, I think, for overt racism on our streets.”
The leader of Reform, Nigel Farage, who is a friend of Trump, later responded: “Angela Eagle and the Labour Party are so scared of this subject that all they can do is throw abuse to anyone who is concerned at the unwanted changes to our country.”
