He was no more polite about London at the time, telling MSNBC’s Morning Joe that, “London and other places … are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.”
A spokeswoman for then-British Prime Minister David Cameron said Trump’s comments on Muslims were “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.” Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, at the time the mayor of London, said Trump’s comments on the dangers of London were “ill-informed” and “utter nonsense.”
Johnson added that “the only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.” Johnson would go on to change his tune about Trump, saying earlier this year there is “little doubt” that the world felt safer and more stable while Trump was in office.
In January 2016, when Trump was a presidential candidate the first time around, he said that living in Brussels is like living in “a hellhole” because of the supposed lack of “assimilation” of the Muslim population.
“You go to Brussels — I was in Brussels a long time ago, 20 years ago, so beautiful, everything is so beautiful — it’s like living in a hellhole right now,” he said in a TV interview with FOX Business Network.
By 2018, when he was president, Trump asked during a meeting on immigration with U.S. lawmakers why the U.S. admits people from “shithole countries” — and while the White House did not deny that Trump used that expression, the man himself tweeted that “this was not the language used.”