Source reveals apparent U-turn by US president, who has previously claimed Brexit would be ‘wonderful thing’ for Britain
Trump 'worried about Brexit impact on US jobs'
Source reveals apparent U-turn by US president, who has previously claimed Brexit would be ‘wonderful thing’ for Britain
Source
reveals apparent U-turn by US president in talks with EU leaders,
having previously said Brexit is ‘wonderful thing’
L
to R: Donald Trump met EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker
in Brussels. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA
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Daniel Boffey in Brussels
Thursday
25 May 2017 14.15 BSTLast modified on Thursday 25 May
2017 16.48 BST
Donald
Trump is said to have told European
Union leaders
he is worried Americans may lose jobs as a result of Britain leaving
the EU, in what would amount to an extraordinary U-turn by the US
president.
An
EU source said Trump spoke of the risks to the global economy posed
by Brexit during a 45-minute meeting in Brussels with Donald Tusk and
Jean-Claude Juncker, presidents of the European council and European
commission respectively.
“Russia,
Ukraine and Brexit were covered during the tête-à-tête”, the EU
source said. “On Brexit, US expressed concern that jobs in the US
would be lost because of Brexit.”
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Further
details of Trump’s comments were not immediately available but the
claim raises questions about whether he still believes
the UK made the right decision in
the EU referendum last June.
The
president was a cheerleader
for Brexit,
describing June’s voteas a “beautiful, beautiful thing”. After
meeting Theresa May at the White House earlier this year, he claimed
Brexit would be a “wonderful thing” for Britain.
He
also suggested in the past that other countries might follow Britain
out of the 28-nation bloc, although in recent weeks he has publicly
revised that view, claiming the EU has been doing a “better job”
of late.
Those
who campaigned for Brexit took succour from Trump’s
consistent claims
that he would reward the UK’s decision to leave the EU with a swift
free trade deal.
EU
officials, however, believe that since taking office he has come to a
greater appreciation of the value of European integration to the US,
whose business leaders have generally supported the way single market
rules offer efficiencies for exporters.
It
was even claimed by unnamed US officials recently that Britain had
been pushed behind the EU in the queue to strike a free trade deal.
During
a private conversation last month, Angela Merkel is said to have
convinced Trump that talks on a US-EU deal would be easier and more
beneficial than he thought.
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It
was reported that Trump had asked the German chancellor 10 times if
he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time Merkel
reportedly replied: “You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only
the EU.”
“On
the 11th refusal, Trump finally got the message: ‘Oh, we’ll do a
deal with Europe then,’”
an unnamed German politician was quoted as saying.
This
suggests the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal between
the EU and US, shelved after Trump’s election victory, could be
revived.
Such
a development would be embarrassing to high-profile Brexiters. The
foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, claimed after meeting the
president’s advisers in January, that Britain
would be “first in line” for
a deal and scorned the view of the former president Barack Obama that
the UK
would be at the back of the queue.
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