‘Trump Baby’ Balloon for President’s Trip to U.K.? London Mayor Says Yesssss

LONDON — A week before President Donald Trump’s working visit to Britain, the mayor of London has allowed an additional participant in the city’s welcome reception: a giant orange balloon of the president depicted as a baby in a diaper.

The balloon was approved amid “Stop Trump” protests planned for the visit starting July 12. Activist groups and trade unions organized an online petition calling on the mayor to allow the effigy to be flown over Parliament. It drew more than 10,000 signatories.

Trump’s visit to Britain was originally scheduled to coincide with the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in January, but it was abruptly canceled with a message on Twitter from the president saying he did not want to inaugurate the building because the Obama administration had paid too much for it.

British and U.S. officials speculated that the real reason Trump had pulled out of the trip was because of the risk of large-scale protests.

At the time, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan — who has had a long-running feud with Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. — said the U.S. president “got the message” from Londoners who “love and admire America and Americans” but find his policies and actions “the polar opposite of our city’s values of inclusion, diversity and tolerance.”

But later, the trip was on again.

Prime Minister Theresa May extended the invitation to the president during a 15-minute meeting at the World Economic Forum in January — a decision that was met with great opposition from the British public.

Leo Murray, an activist and the creator of the inflatable “Trump Baby,” criticized May for inviting Trump despite a petition signed by nearly 2 million people asking her to scrap the plan.

“It’s on everyone who knows the difference between right and wrong to resist this grotesque excuse for a president when he comes here,” Murray wrote in a column for the newspaper Metro. “He needs to be run out of town, figuratively at least. But how? This is a man who lacks the capacity for moral shame. Liberal outrage just makes him smirk harder.”

Murray suggested that the only way to get through to the president is to “get down on his level and talk to him in a language he understands: personal insults.”

May was the first foreign leader to visit Trump at the White House, in January, in a bid to strengthen relations with Britain’s single largest trading partner outside the European Union before Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc.

A spokesman for the mayor said Khan supported the right to peaceful protests and realized that planned demonstrations could take different forms.

“His city operations team have met with the organizers and have given them permission to use Parliament Square Garden as a grounding point for the blimp,” the representative said in a statement.

Chances are that Trump, accompanied by his wife, Melania, will steer clear of the protests in central London since most of his meetings with British officials and Queen Elizabeth II have been scheduled outside the city at a country residence and Windsor Castle.

After two days of meetings and a news conference, Trump will travel to Scotland, where he will spend the weekend, the Prime Minister’s Office said Friday.

But the presence of the balloon in London could further strain relations between the mayor and Trump, who have been involved in a series of Twitter spats over the past year.

The organizers will still need final approval from the Metropolitan Police and from British air traffic control before they can fly the balloon, however.

“I’m really proud of our mayor, who is just about the only person who is standing up for our city’s values of respect, tolerance, and diversity,” said Louise Pratt, another activist involved in the balloon campaign.

“As if our Brexit woes weren’t bad enough, Theresa May is now forcing us to get on our knees and beg for business deals from a crook,” Pratt added. “What has this country come to? It’s an utter disgrace.”

Trump has inspired other outsize protests. Last year, an artist and documentary filmmaker inflated a giant Trump chicken with a golden coif in view of the White House to try to make a statement about the president being a “weak and ineffective leader.” An anarchist group also displayed nude life-size orange statues of the presidential candidate in American cities.

Nigel Farage, former leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party and a Trump supporter, criticized the mayor’s decision to approve the balloon, saying on Twitter that it would make London look ridiculous. “This is the biggest insult to a sitting US President ever,” he wrote.

Aidan Kerr, a media officer for the Scottish Labour Party, begged to differ, retorting on Twitter, “We literally burned down the White House in 1814.”