Last Friday, during her meeting with Donald Trump, the British prime minister announced that Trump was invited to an official state visit to England. She immediately met with a massive backlash from her electorate; a petition demanding that the Queen cancel the visit gathered more than one million signatures over the weekend.
Trump, it turns out, isn’t so popular with the British public, perhaps because of his lewd tweets about Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, as well as his general sexism and racism. There’s also the fact that Trump’s executive order on immigration might ban certain dual-citizen Brits from traveling to the United States, although that matter is murky because of the ambiguous execution of the policy.
Now May is trying to distance herself from the state visit, saying it wasn’t her idea but the decision of the “State Visit Committee.” The only problem with this excuse is that until this morning, British journalists had never heard of the “State Visit Committee.” As one commenter notes, May’s attempt to pass the blame “to the Foreign Office and a committee which may or may not exist was just petrified cowardice.”