Team Trump on UK minister who attacked him: Who she?

WASHINGTON D.C. — U.K. government minister Angela Eagle might have expected to rile Donald Trump when she accused him of emboldening British racists.

But the U.S. presidential hopeful’s team dismissed her comments Tuesday with a withering putdown.

“Nobody knows who this random person is or cares what comes out of her mouth,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. “Who is she and what does she do?”

Eagle laid into Trump during the Labour party’s annual conference in Liverpool, U.K. this week. The new minister for illegal immigration said it was difficult for new immigrants to “rise above the constant drumbeat of toxic anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become emboldened, not only in Britain but across the western countries.”

And she singled out Trump by name. “I mean, Trump does the same,” Eagle said. “If you look at some of the memes that he’s using with the wall stuff at the moment, it’s astonishing, quite the level of vitriol that it has created.”

Her comments, first reported in the Guardian, come as the British government tries to smooth relations with Trump and his camp in case he wins the presidential election in November and the two administrations need to work together.

Nigel Farage, a U.K. MP and friend of Trump, said attacking those who want to speak up about immigration is no route to making friends.

“Angela Eagle and the Labour Party are so scared of this subject that all they can do is throw abuse at anyone who is concerned at the unwanted changes to our country,” he said.

In her comments, Eagle also took direct aim at the U.K. Conservatives, accusing them of using “toxic” language to fend off the threat of Farage’s right-wing Reform UK.

“We had a discourse as the right of the Conservative party got more and more obsessed with what Reform was doing that was very toxic indeed, othering asylum seekers, othering human beings in general, and creating a space, I think, for overt racism on our streets,” she said.