When President Donald Trump sits down with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the Oval Office on Thursday, he’ll face — and, one hopes, face down — a political leader who sees the world as differently as possible from himself.
Trump’s core agenda is to restore America’s greatness. Whether one thinks he attempts this clumsily or with skill, there is no mistaking the goal he wishes to achieve. He wants this country to be rich again, not to sluice its wealth into the sinkhole of post-modern socialism. He wants it militarily powerful, respected, and to an extent feared around the world. And he wants it proud and unapologetic about its culture and history, including its roots in the soil and values of England.
Starmer, by contrast, gives every impression of being ashamed of Britain’s past greatness and determined to ensure that its history of high achievement, commercial prowess, and world leadership is impossible to achieve ever again.
There can have been few more excruciatingly humiliating and shameful photographs of senior British politicians than the one taken in 2020 of Starmer dropping meekly to one knee in tribute to the racial grifting organization Black Lives Matter, signaling, as has done on other occasions, that he stigmatizes his own country as systemically racist. It is true that he rejects absurd calls on Britain to pay slavery reparations, but he does so only because he wants to be “looking forward rather than looking backward.”
He clearly regards Britain’s history of slavery and much else as nothing to be proud of. It is an inconvenient truth for him, not a matter of pride, that Britain did more than any other country to stamp out that abhorrent slave trade. Among other things, it devoted an entire Royal Navy squadron to its eradication even when fighting a hemispheric war against Napoleon.
Speaking of the Napoleonic War, Starmer’s political party has stripped from the walls of Parliament a wonderful portrait of the Duke of Wellington, hero of the Iberian Peninsula campaign and Waterloo. His MPs have also removed five portraits of Sir Winston Churchill, one of history’s great men and the savior of Britain and European democracy.
Starmer has nixed a portrait of Lady Thatcher that hung in his London residence at No. 10 Downing St. Perhaps he wanted to achieve gender balance and, having discarded the Iron Duke, felt he should also jettison the Iron Lady. More likely, he just didn’t like having a steel-spined Conservative leader looking down balefully at him while he did his flaccid left-wing work.
One can, in truth, accept that a Labour leader might reasonably not want a supply-side Tory decorating his living space, but what should one think of Starmer’s decision also to remove a fine, well-known portrait of Shakespeare? What has the Swan of Avon, as Ben Jonson called him, done to merit eviction? Was he not one of the four greatest tragedians in world history, along with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides?
That’s his problem. His problems are that he is long dead, white, a man, and a genius who stood out even during the cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance. His antiquity, race, sex, and exceptional creativity make him an embarrassment and a standing rebuke to advocates of the dreary, dysfunctional, radically egalitarian post-liberal state over which Starmer enthusiastically presides.
In contrast, Trump restored a bust of Churchill to the Oval Office after then-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden removed them. He also restored a controversial portrait of President Andrew Jackson. These moves are symbolic. Trump stands by the good and the great of the West; Obama, Biden, and the Democrats worked busily to repudiate them.
Like Obama and Biden, Starmer is also undermining the West’s international potency and authority. He announced increased defense spending shortly before setting off for Washington and boasted on X, “As we enter a new era for Britain’s national security, we will meet tyranny and violence with resolve and strength.” But if that were true, as my fellow columnist and member of the House of Lords, Dan Hannan, replied, Starmer would not be handing over strategic British territory at the behest of Chinese and Russian judges.
This refers to Starmer’s plan to give sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, which include the U.S. submarine base of Diego Garcia, to Mauritius, 1,339 miles away. The Chagos Islands are perfectly located in the Indian Ocean for strategic intelligence, and Starmer is undoing this advantage at the bidding of international judges, including a former official of Communist China who backed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Trump is reportedly furious over the deal, which, if truth be told, Starmer likes for reasons of appeasement and unmerited guilt about colonialism.
Trump can fix the problem by nixing Starmer’s dreadful deal. Patriotic pride must beat unpatriotic shame — and the president should make this plain to the prime minister in the Oval Office.