For a president who usually tweets first and asks questions later, Donald Trump’s initial reaction to the Salisbury attack has been curiously slow. Eleven days on from the poisoning of a former Russian agent, Trump’s Twitter account remains silent on the subject. But now that Theresa May is ramping up the rhetoric against Russia – ordering 23 Russian spies to leave Britain – the Trump administration is finally riding firmly behind May, and pointing the finger at Putin in a way it never has before.
The White House issued a statement last night saying it ‘stands in solidarity with its closest ally, the United Kingdom’. While the evidence linking the attack to Russia might not be good enough for Jeremy Corbyn, the US government is more willing to trust the Brits: ‘The United States shares the United Kingdom’s assessment that Russia is responsible for the reckless nerve agent attack on a British citizen and his daughter’, the statement says.
The wording of the White House response is also remarkably similar to May’s own speech in parliament yesterday, suggesting this is something of a coordinated take down of Putin.
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