John Wight, the host of the weekly Radio Sputnik show Hard Facts, joined Loud & Clear to discuss the visit.
"I have to tell you, in all candor, I have never seen anything quite like this in all my years in politics and geopolitics," Wight told Loud & Clear host John Kiriakou and Sputnik news analyst Walter Smolarek, who is filling in for Brian Becker. More than 100,000 Britons took to the streets in protest of the president's visit Friday.
Speaking from Scotland, Wight noted that Trump punctured "decades of diplomatic niceties" just prior to arriving in the UK while he was at the NATO summit in Brussels. Trump drew ire from European partners after saying Germany is "captive" to Russia, cancelling a bilateral meeting with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis at the 11th hour, and demanding more money from European nations be spent on NATO defense — a move political commentator George Galloway told Loud & Clear on Thursday was an act "like Tony Soprano."
In the UK, Trump came weilding a "Brexit dagger," Wight says, which "he proceeded to use to knife [UK Prime Minister Theresa May] in the back in the course of an interview he gave to Rupert Murdoch's popular, right-wing, populist, tabloid newspaper The Sun," which Wight called the media mogul's "cash cow" in the UK.
— Greenpeace UK (@GreenpeaceUK) July 13, 2018
The Australian-American businessman is the 34th richest person in the US and 96th richest worldwide, according to Forbes, who has also called him and his family the 35th "most powerful person" in the world. Murdoch is the executive director of Fox News and founder of News Corp, which includes Sky News, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and other newspapers and media outlets around the world. He's also the executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of National Geographic and Fox Television stations.
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 13, 2018
In the interview with The Sun, Trump "railed against Theresa May's attempt to arrive at a "soft Brexit," which would involve continuing some ties to the EU on the part of the UK," Wight said.
Trump said that the UK's former Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, who resigned on Monday over May's soft Brexit plan, would "make a great prime minister," in the interview.
At a Friday news conference, Trump called CNN "fake news" again, refusing to take their reporter's question. "Let's go to a real network," he said before opting to take a question from Fox News reporter instead.
British politicians across the board denounced Trump's actions and the president wound up walking back the interview and characterizing The Sun's article as "fake news." Trump also claimed The Sun omitted supposedly positive comments about the current prime minister he said he made.
"If anybody needed any confirmation that UK is a glorified vassal state of the US, then surely this is it," Wight said.
