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A city once paved with gold is today riddled with Isis checkpoints, according to Maga world. Dick Whittington found no gold on London’s streets. The 2026 version of the fabled character would have similar trouble locating London’s sharia-governed no-go zones. But the myth of London as a third-world sinkhole is now central to Maga politics. Restoring Britain’s allegedly vanishing character is also an official goal of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
The question is why? It is not enough to succeed, said Gore Vidal; others must fail. That London is doing fine in spite of being an immigrant city — and partly because of it — is a provocation to the Maga movement on both sides of the Atlantic. London serves as the most visible symbol of a Europe that Trump’s national security strategy claims is facing “civilisational erasure”. If you add in Silicon Valley’s animus towards EU and UK digital safety regulations, the coming year promises escalation in the transatlantic ideological conflict. London gets star billing.
Not a day goes by when Trump’s close ally, Steve Bannon, does not cite London as a sharia-governed city. Bannon has shifted his daily War Room broadcast from Washington to Texas to back a state referendum that would ban sharia law (Prop 10). Other US states are pushing similar propositions. Rhetoric against the Islamic threat looks set to return to centre stage in the Republican midterm election campaign. “London is exhibit A in our warning,” says Bannon.
London is also the prime target of the US state department’s campaign against Europe’s alleged censorship regime. As my colleagues reported last week, Sarah Rogers, Trump’s under-secretary for public diplomacy, called the UK’s online safety law “tyrannical” and openly backs Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. America’s goal is to empower freedom-loving Brits and their continental European peers, Rogers argues. She is spending US taxpayers’ money in service of that cause.
Trump’s ideological war on Europe has two prongs. The first is the fight against multiculturalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans stand in as overseas Democrats. In that respect, Europe, and Canada and Australia to some degree, serve as a foil for US domestic politics. The second is a commercial battle against alleged European censorship. They are two sides of the same coin. Trump and many of his Silicon Valley backers disagree over the annual H1B foreign worker visas that Big Tech needs. On Europe, however, they are united. Elon Musk’s backing of far-right European figures, including Britain’s Tommy Robinson, is indistinguishable from his campaign against European regulation.
When Brussels in December imposed a €120mn fine on X for breaching EU data laws, JD Vance, the US vice-president, said: “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.” Britain’s threat in January to ban Musk’s X over his AI platform’s generation of sexualised images of children produced instant retaliatory threats from Trump officials. “From America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” said Rogers.
This is where Trump’s goals clash. Standing up for your country’s commercial interests is normal for any government. Threatening to retaliate against countries that are trying to protect their children from abuse and exploitation enters provocative new territory. Nor does it serve Trump’s Maga allies. Eighty-one per cent of Brits disapprove of Trump, which includes a lot of Reform voters. Trump is often associated in foreign minds with Jeffrey Epstein. The widening scandal over the child sex offender’s connections has claimed a British ambassador, a Downing Street chief of staff and could still topple Keir Starmer’s prime ministership. That no US political figure from either party has been felled by the scandal is well known beyond America.
Add to this that Trump’s administration now requires five years of social media history for once-routine UK and EU visa applications — and that these rules are set to apply to visiting World Cup football fans — and you have the ingredients of a populist reaction to Trump’s America. Not for the first time, Trump is in danger of being hoist on his own petard. London’s “disgraceful” third-term mayor, Sadiq Khan, is boosted by Trump’s animosity. Canada’s quest for a concert of like-minded middle powers is being made easier. Agitating for free speech while sifting through foreign social media histories seems self-contradicting. Insisting that this is a battle for civilisation is likely to produce a lasting breach.