How the ‘flatter Trump’ strategy works
Hi, I’m Mike Crawley. I’m a senior reporter for CBC News, covering the U.S.
There’s plenty of ground for disagreement between U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and U.S. President Donald Trump, whether it’s the U.K.’s plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, its firm opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or the impact of U.S. tariffs on British exports.
Those issues have the potential to make the pair’s joint news conference, scheduled for Thursday, fraught.
Yet through multiple meetings since Trump’s inauguration — including at the G7 summit in Alberta in June, at a Trump golf course in Scotland in July and again at the White House in August — relations between Starmer and the president have appeared generally cordial.
Starmer has used what John Rentoul, chief political commentator for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, calls a “flatter Trump” strategy but says it remains to be seen whether it will win Trump over on Ukraine.
“Trump is mercurial,” Rentoul told The World Today, a publication of Chatham House, the London-based foreign policy think-tank. “Starmer needs to keep up the pressure and to exploit Trump’s love of British pageantry to the full.”
