The mayor of London has said that Donald Trump’s term as US president led to a significant rise in racist abuse directed at him.
While on a five-day trade mission to the US, London mayor Sadiq Khan told San Francisco’s Stanford University “during those four years he was president, that led to me having police protection and a lot of racial abuse”.
He added the temporary and permanent banning of the US ex-President Donald Trump from Twitter led to a substantial drop in such racist abuse.
The mayor of London says he has received at least 233,000 “explicitly racist or racialized social media messages” since being elected mayor of London in 2016.
Sadiq Khan partly blamed a 1,892% rise in racist abuse on Donald Trump’s election as US president.
A feud started in 2017 when Mr. Trump criticized the mayor over his response to the London Bridge terror attacks.
“He’s not my biggest fan,” Sadiq Khan told the audience in Silicon Valley.
The mayor of London was elected mayor of London in May 2016, six months before US President Donald Trump won the White House.
The ex-US president first criticized Mr. Khan, who was the first Muslim to be elected as the mayor of a major Western city, for his response to the London Bridge terror attacks in 2017.
During his 2019 visit to the UK, the former US president later called the London leader a “stone-cold loser” who had failed to manage crime rates in the capital.
It comes as Elon Musk, the richest man in the world declared he would reverse Donald Trump’s “foolish” ban from the platform as part of the plans to make permanent account suspensions a “rare thing” and support more free speech.
This has prompted a warning that hundreds of profiles belonging to the “very worst” trolls previously banned from the site could return.