Trump in new Twitter attack on London mayor

US President Donald Trump launched a fresh attack on Saturday on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, backing a right-wing British columnist who has been widely accused of Islamophobia and once called migrants “cockroaches.”

Trump attached his latest denunciation of the mayor to a retweet by Katie Hopkins about crime in “Khan’s Londonistan.”

“LONDON needs a new mayor ASAP. Khan is a disaster - will only get worse!” Trump wrote in response to Hopkins’ tweet, later adding the mayor was “a national disgrace who is destroying” the city.

Trump said the mayor should “focus on crime in London, not me,” and made a derisive reference to Khan’s height.

Trump on Saturday also accused The New York Times of “a virtual act of treason,” after it reported the US is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid.

Current and former government officials have described the classified deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s power grid and other targets, the Times reported.

The action is intended partly as a warning but also to leave the US poised to conduct cyberstrikes in the event of a major conflict between the US and Russia, the newspaper said.

Trump tweeted that the accusations were “NOT TRUE,” calling the media “corrupt” and repeating accusations that journalists are “the enemy of the people.”

“Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia,” he wrote.

“This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country.”

Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, had led opposition to Trump’s visit, writing a newspaper article in which he compared the US leader to European dictators from the 1930s and 1940s.

At that time, the mayor’s spokesman called Trump’s tweets “childish” and “beneath the president of the United States.”

Agencies