Boris Johnson endorses Donald Trump and says he believes he won’t abandon Ukraine
Boris Johnson has endorsed Donald Trump as the next US president, claiming a second term for the controversial Republican could be a “big win for the world”.
The former prime minister said the growing prospect of a comeback by Mr Trump had caused the “global wokerati” to tremble “so violently that you could hear the ice tinkling in their negronis”.
Mr Trump’s hopes of returning to the White House were boosted this week when he won the Iowa Republican caucus, despite his various legal problems, including four indictments.
This has fuelled concern in European capitals, including in London’s Whitehall, with some leading figures concerned that a second Trump presidency will weaken the resolve of Nato against Russia in Ukraine.
In a separate development, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky invited Mr Trump – who has claimed he can end the war within 24 hours – to Kyiv. He told Channel 4 News: “Yes please, Donald Trump — I invite you to Ukraine, to Kyiv. If you can stop the war during 24 hours I think it will be enough to come to Kyiv, on any day I am here.”
In his weekly column in the Daily Mail, Mr Johnson, who met Mr Trump several times when the two men were in office, wrote: “If you look at the facts, you can actually make a case – and I may as well make it now – that a Trump presidency could be just what the world needs.”
Mr Johnson insisted Joe Biden had “excellent qualities” and was a “firm Atlanticist and friend to this country”.
He described Mr Trump’s actions during the Capitol Hill riots of 6 January, 2021 were an “egregious error” and that “he should have accepted the voters’ decision with good grace”.
But he said, despite fears over Mr Trump’s approach to Russia, he had been the first US president to support Ukraine after Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, and had supplied Kyiv with Javelin anti-tank weapons.
Mr Johnson wrote: “So, whatever they now say about President Trump, I cannot believe that he will want to go down in history as the president who abandoned a country that he has already signally helped to keep free.
“To all his Ukraine-sceptic supporters in the Republican Party, I say: how can you possibly make America great again if you allow a Russian tyrant to inflict a total humiliation on the West?
“I simply cannot believe that Trump will ditch the Ukrainians; on the contrary, having worked out, as he surely has, that there is no deal to be done with Putin, I reckon there is a good chance that he will double down and finish what he started – by giving them what they need to win.
“If that is the case, then there is every chance, under Trump, that the West will be stronger, and the world more stable. Can you really say that the world feels safer now than it did when Trump was president?”
Mr Johnson also said Mr Trump would do better than President Biden in standing up to Iran, claiming that the attacks by Hamas on Israel and Houthis using Iranian missiles to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea would not have happened “if Donald Trump had been president for the past four years?”
He added: “You could certainly argue, on this evidence, that what the world needs now is a US leader whose willingness to use force and sheer unpredictability is a major deterrent to the enemies of the West. If so, that leader is Trump.
“So to all my high-minded anti-Trump friends I say, calm down, folks. The more you froth and fret, the more determined his supporters will be – and a Trump victory will continue to migrate from possibility to likelihood to nailed-on certainty.
“We all need to grow up and get used to the prospect. If he does the right thing and backs the Ukrainians – and I believe he will – a Trump presidency can be a big win for the world.”
