Trump’s On-Again, Off-Again Trip to Britain Is Set for July

WASHINGTON — The White House announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump will make his first visit to Britain on July 13, a trip the White House had repeatedly put off amid friction between the American president and one of the United States’ closest allies.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain was the first foreign leader to visit the White House after Trump took office, and said then that she had conveyed an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for Trump to make a formal state visit to Britain, which the president accepted.

But in the year since, the visit has become more like an on-again, off-again date, with a politically tricky back story to match. The July trip will be a working visit with May, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, a downgrade from the kind of ceremonial state visit that was initially offered.

Trump had been slated to visit London earlier this year to open the new American Embassy, but abruptly canceled the trip with a message on Twitter in January in which he blamed the cost and location of the building. Both British and U.S. officials speculated at the time that the president had scrapped the visit because of the risk of public protests that had threatened to embarrass both Trump and May, who was doing her best to distance herself from him after statements Trump had made that some Britons considered deeply divisive.

Last year, as White House officials worked to find a suitable date for the trip, Trump cooled to the idea amid a backlash in Britain to comments he made after a terrorist attack in London in June. A few hours after a van mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge and attackers inside went on a stabbing rampage in the streets, Trump scolded Sadiq Khan, the city’s mayor, on Twitter.

“At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!'” Trump wrote. Khan had used the phrase to calm Londoners about the presence of heavily armed security forces deployed throughout the city after the attack.

Tentative plans to include the United Kingdom in a trip Trump was making to Europe the next month were scrapped, and the visit was instead penciled in for the fall.

Then in September, Trump seized on a bombing in London to promote his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries, and suggested the assailants had been known to Scotland Yard, angering May.

Two months later, Trump’s retweets of a far-right group’s anti-Muslim videos stirred criticism from across the political spectrum in Britain, and prompted May to criticize him publicly.

On Thursday, Sanders announced the new date for the trip during a briefing with journalists’ children on Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. It falls just after a NATO summit meeting in Brussels that the president is expected to attend.

But it will not be in time for the major event of the year in London: the royal wedding next month of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle, who has been a vocal critic of Trump. British newspapers had reported that the couple had been under pressure to include Trump and his wife, Melania, on the guest list, but Kensington Palace announced this month that no politicians would be invited.