President Donald Trump said he canceled a trip to London, claiming it was due to costs of a new embassy. There have been calls in the UK to scrub the visit.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has canceled a trip to London, in a tweet that blamed his predecessor for selling the previous U.S. Embassy in that city for "peanuts."
Therehave been callsin the U.K. for the British government to call off the planned trip after Trump shared anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant videos on Twitter that were posted by a senior member of a fringe far-right group.
Trump also famously attacked London Mayor Sadiq Khan in the aftermath of a terror attack in that city in 2017 on the London Bridge.
The president said on Twitter just before midnight, "Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for 'peanuts,' only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal."
The State Department announced it was taking the first steps towardembassy relocation in 2008, when George W. Bush was president.
In 2015 Lydia Muniz, the director of the bureau of overseas building operations at the State Department, said that upgrading the existing embassy would have cost $550 million and still would not be as secure as the new embassy according to the Associated Press. Muniz said at the time that the U.S. sold other properties in London to finance the entire cost of the new embassy.