Boris Johnson, the UK foreign minister, said he’d like to tweet like President Trump, saying he has “gripped the imagination around the world.”
By “imagination,” he was not referring to the hundreds of delusions Trump has spread during his presidency, but the ability of the president to engage people in what politics has become these days.
“I think actually that Donald Trump’s approach to politics has been something that has gripped the imagination of people around the world,” said Johnson on BBC Radio 4 Thursday morning. “He’s engaged people in politics in a way that we haven’t seen for a long time with his tweets and all the rest of it.”
In Britain Johnson is, like Trump, known and often mocked for his distinctively unruly blond hair. But he doesn’t want the twinning to stop there — he’d like to have the president’s tweeting ability but said that basic governmental decorum stops him from doing so. “I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to tweet in the way that, in the way that he as much as I might like to,” he said. “I’m seeing my foreign office minders looking extremely apprehensive here.”
A head-to-head matchup shows that while Trump was dispatching a retweet condemned around the world — a gif that showed him punching a man with a CNN logo superimposed over his head, with the caption #FraudNewsCNN — Johnson was tending to boring old diplomacy with Iraq’s foreign minister, whose troops have now reduced ISIS’s footprint by 80%, almost completely unnoticed by the media.
Great to catch up w/ Iraqi Foreign Minister Jaafari. Recognised Iraq’s military success against Daesh & underlined cont’d UK commitment pic.twitter.com/r0pqw8NnEv
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) July 3, 2017
Aside from his accolades, Johnson did say in the interview that the UK has been a moderating check on Trump. “We in the UK do not agree, by any means, with everything that Washington currently says,” he said, then referenced the G20 summit that opens today: “It is very important to understand that when Theresa May goes to meet the president today, as she will in Hamburg … our role is to represent our own point of view.
“Whether it’s on NATO, climate change, the Iran nuclear accord, it is the UK that is actually helping, we think, to mitigate, to get some of those American attitudes and policies that are currently coming out of the White House into a better place. If you look at the last 12 months or so there has been a great deal of progress.”
