Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, both candidates to lead the British Conservative party, weighed in on President Trump’s Sunday tweet suggesting some members of Congress “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Regarding whether they agreed with Prime Minister Theresa May’s earlier condemnation of Trump’s tweet as “completely unacceptable,” Hunt said that he did and further stated, “I have three half-Chinese children … British citizens, born on the NHS and if anyone told them to go back to China I would be utterly appalled.”
Johnson likewise offered criticism of Trump’s tweet, saying, “If you’re the leader of a great, multi-racial, multi-cultural society you simply cannot use that kind of language about sending people back to where they came from … it’s totally unacceptable.”
Both men declined, however, to characterize Trump’s tweet as racist. Hunt said that as U.K. foreign secretary it would be unhelpful to use “that kind of language” to describe the president of the United States, the United Kingdom’s closest ally.
