Im no fan of Starmer but …

[BettyWhittaker]

I am very anti - Labour government, have never voted Labour in my life and never would and I hope an early GE is called …

BUT - AIBU to think he really couldn’t have handled Trump any better than he had? Christ the man is completely unhinged, his behaviour is getting worse and worse - AIBU to think Starmer really couldn’t have done more to handle this?

I thought his statement yesterday was pretty good. Let’s just hope the mad man gets taken out of office before he kicks off another bloody war

How on earth is Trumps mental decline Starmer’s fault? He’s doing the best he could in this ridiculous situation. Do tell … what SHOULD he be doing?

As Trumps actions towards other countries are the same or worse, then i guess you apply this to pretty much the rest of the Worlds leaders...

..aside from Putin...

Maybe that should be more worrying.

Trump's behaviour is getting worse. Not towards the u k in particular, but towards everybody.
I'm no Starmer fan, but i've been impressed. Thank god it was some who hasn't sucked up too much or over reacted.
Truss, Johnson or Farage would have been terrible
. May and Cameron possibly OK.

I pity anyone trying to deal with Trump right now tbh. I loathe Starmer and I still feel sorry for him having to deal with this.

Same, I can’t stand the man but I can’t fault him on this one.

I never thought about Trump and Johnson being in charge at the same time - that would have been.....ummmmm.......

I think he must be, he’s completely out of control and to be honest there have been signs that he’s unwell for a while. I once saw a video of him supposedly talking about something serious and important and then he ended up going on about some mad rant on squirrels. It was so bizarre that I honestly thought it was an A.I joke but no, it turned out to be real.

Starner, regardless of whether you approve of him or not, is a very, very, clever man. He’s a strategist who plays the long game and he’s playing this the right way. We can’t afford to wave a red flag at Trump. He’s clearly a very ill man and completely unhinged to the extent he’s lost his grip on reality. He’s behaving more like a petulant Roman emperor than a strong global leader. I’m astonished his own party haven’t don’t more to wind him in, but then I’m not sure how they could.

it needs to be made clear that the US can't simply take parts of Europe that it fancies having.

The thing is though - it can. The US can do absolutely anything it wants in Western Europe. We are in a military alliance with them. They have the codes to the UK’s nuclear weapons; they control a lot of our military hardware and software. They can put troops here in days. There is absolutely fuck all we can do about it. Send the UK Army (all 200,000 of them) to Washington, will we? I don’t think so.

We’re in a vice and there are no good options.

He's definitely unwell, likely some form of dementia. All the labels going up at the white house for example, no one needs a sign outside of the oval office telling them it's the oval office, unless you have a severe cognitive issue like dementia and this is exactly what they do with other dementia sufferers. We can only hope someone steps in soon and convinces him he's unfit for office, a la Biden. Although the alternative is .... Worrying.

Given the circumstances Starmer did well handling him.

Wikipedia is free, as is Google. Take a look at his career as a barrister. Anybody not impressed by it is lying.

You should look up "How to deal with those with Dementia.."

Arguing back at them, is the worst thing you can do.

Starmer has also not ruled out anything if the Trump continues down this path.

His latest rant about Diego Garcia … I wouldn’t be suprised if the next line is that the US “needs” to take that over too as the UK are trying to give it away. He’s acting like he’s only just heard about it - he’s known about it since middle of last year! Why bring it up now as if it’s new information?

For all his faults, I also think Starmer is steering as good a course through this as he possibly can. Of course, we'd all love him to have his Love Actually moment and tell Trump to fuck off, but we also know that he can't do that because the UK's national interests are so inextricably linked with the US - and that is the fault of successive governments and not a situation of Starmer's own making.

It was good to see Badenoch showing some support and solidarity over the weekend. We need a united front on this and no political point scoring.

Honestly, though, I think Starmer is stuck in an impossible position here, and no matter what he does, the outcome isn't going to be good. Trump seems totally serious about Greenland and there is nothing that the UK, or the EU, can realistically do to stop him.

I think the priority for our leaders going forward has to be to figure out how on earth we can start to disentangle ourselves from the US and build up our own defensive capabilities. But I don't even know if that's possible...

No it cannot, the UK and Europe still has significant capabilities beyond the US hardware.

Plus the world economy, inc the US's would fall off a cliff if the US acted in this way, everything we know would stop.

It wont happen, which is why Trumps opening gambit was trade tariffs, not military.
Those around him, know the US public do support any of this and their Congress wouldn't fund it either.

It must be incredibly tempting at times for Starmer to just say "fuck it" and walk away.

I agree that there are no good options, but there are definitely options.

Ban US social media, sell off stockpiled US debt bonds, turn off all intelligence sharing, a lot of US satellite data is routed through a UK satellite ground station - shut that off, the EU can cut off/restrict access to the single market, expel US troops and close the bases. Some of these are extreme and some are incendiary, but if EU leaders do think military action in Greenland becomes inevitable, those options do exist.

I think he praised the deal at the time!

That speach was a masterclass in diplomacy and statesmanship

He is a diplomat and he's good at it.

Britain is isolated realistically , we need the USA trade deals post Brexit and also need the EU which we chose to leave. SI bes doing a bloody fantastic job

Trump has no respect for weakness and he views Europe/ Nato/ Starmer, Labour as weak and he would be correct imo. However I don’t agree with the way he does things.

Agree.

Tbh, I feel sorry for Starmer. His time as PM has got to be one of the hardest a PM has ever had to face and just gets harder and harder with the likes of Trump making every situation more difficult.

I kinda get annoyed with people just ripping into him without thinking things through.

I must admit that I skipped over the barrister bit because that was being a barrister, applying existing law. He hasn't done much foreign relations with his politician's hat on, creating or reacting to situations.

It's hard to tell the difference between reality and satire these days. I thought yesterday's text to the Norwegian PM was a spoof at first.

I agree.

We live in an era where people want instant results, and big displays of protest/support, and things are black and white and we don’t have to think about the consequences.

Anyone with half a brain should know this isn’t an attitude to apply to diplomacy on this scale.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also welcomed the deal, saying it "secures the long-term, stable and effective operation of the joint US-UK military facility at Diego Garcia, which is critical to regional and global security"

Very difficult dealing with an administration that acts like this....