In her new book, former British Prime Minister Liz Truss directs scathing attacks and ridicule at Joe Biden, president of her country’s closest ally. Biden was guilty of “utter hypocrisy and ignorance,” Truss writes, when the US leader said he “disagreed[d] with the policy” of “cutting taxes on the super-rich” in the Truss mini-budget introduced in September 2022, shortly after he took power.
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“I was shocked and dismayed that Biden would breach protocol by commenting on British domestic policy,” Truss added. “We have been the United States’ closest allies through thick and thin.”
Such harsh words between British and American leaders, in or out of office, would normally seem unusual. But Truss still has scores to settle. By the time Biden spoke, in an ice cream parlor in Portland, Oregon, Truss’s mini-budget had already caused panic over Britain’s pension funds, threatened to crash the British economy and had been withdrawn – a humiliating reversal for any prime minister, let alone anything working for more than a month. Six days later, Truss was forced to resign.
A year and a half later, as she offers the public her version of what went so terribly wrong, Truss still manages to thunder: “What the Biden administration and the [European Union]and their international allies did not want a country to demonstrate that things can be done differently and undermine them in the process.”
Maybe. Either way, Biden is still president, while Truss is now just a backbencher MP for a constituency in rural Norfolk. But the release of her book Ten Years to Save the West, along with the founding of Popular Conservatism, a new pressure group, says a lot about where she sees her future.
Rather than taking her allowance and pursuing traditional, relatively sedate pursuits – lobbying, for example, or trying to achieve peace in the Middle East – Truss wants to remain relevant to the global populist right, especially in the US.
Truss’s book will be published in the US and Britain on Tuesday. The American jacket is being praised by two far-right senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, both vocal enemies of Biden. It also has a different subtitle than the British edition. In Britain, Truss would offer ‘lessons from the only Conservative in the room’. In the US she is leading the revolution against globalism, socialism and the liberal establishment.
It’s a lot to pack in between her school career – Truss has two daughters – and her duties as an MP in Norfolk. But it all points to a clear ambition to be present in the right-wing American media, long visible.
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In February, Truss attended the CPAC conference in Maryland, where he spoke to an audience of what Politico called “stunned conservatives” before appearing with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman and White House adviser, a leading far-right voice who pitched Truss. in controversy with comments about jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson.
Truss will return soon and visit Washington to promote her book with the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, a sweeping and controversial plan for a second Trump administration.
Truss’ relationship with Heritage is well established. She spoke there in 2015 as trade secretary, over the objections of the British ambassador, and accepted an award named after Margaret Thatcher there last year. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, also publishes the U.S. edition of Truss’ book.
The foundation is a few miles from the White House, but Truss is unlikely to reach out to Biden or his administration. That might as well be. Elsewhere in her book, she describes meeting the president at the White House in September 2021, when she was foreign secretary under Boris Johnson.
“Our Oval Office meeting lasted about an hour and a half,” Truss wrote, adding that this was not a sign of favor.
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“The truth was, it was more due to Biden’s tendency to tell elaborate anecdotes in response to every problem that arose. “Ah, that reminds me…” he would say, as his officials looked at each other with a knowing smile. Ten minutes later the story would end and he would move on to something else.
Biden’s age, 81, and mental capacity to be president are the source of continued media speculation and political attacks — and strong backlash in the White House. But Truss has more to say. At the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow later in 2021, “she ran into Joe Biden again. He recalled our meeting at the White House and told me he would never forget “those blue eyes” even though we had both worn Covid masks.
It is not clear whether the reader should think that Biden or Truss were under the impression that face coverings also obscure the eyes.
Truss is still not ready. She includes the president and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi among US politicians seen as “unhelpful” on Northern Ireland issues, with their interventions “generally on one side of the spectrum.” discussion, undoubtedly encouraged by the Irish embassy in Washington.”
She also describes how she attended the UN General Assembly in New York as Prime Minister in September 2022. There, she says, “Biden regaled me with stories about the Democrats’ campaign trail, including an incident in which he had fallen over. He said, “I see them thinking, ‘You can’t get up, Grandpa,’ but I got up.”
“I was under the impression he was running again in 2024,” Truss wrote, before risking a deductible by writing about a faux pas at the same event when she shouted, “Hello, Dr. Biden!” to “a blonde lady” who turned out to be Brigitte Macron, the wife of the President of France.
“I hope she didn’t hear!” writes Truss.
The vignette about Biden at the UN is not the only one in Ten Years to Save the West in which Truss uses “Democrat” to refer to the Democratic party. It’s a telling choice. Republicans have long used the incorrect term as a term for political abuse. Nor is it the only instance in which Truss – or her American editors – have had to adjust or explain her language.
When writing about British politics, as in most of the book, Truss often has to provide translations or explanations for American readers. To give a small but telling example, referring to her distaste for National Insurance – a payroll tax that supports state pensions and unemployment and disability benefits – she calls it “a right to social security”. On the US right, “right” is almost as dirty a word as “democrat.”
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At least until the eve of publication day, Truss had shied away from mentioning Donald Trump’s name, but said she wanted a Republican in the White House in 2025. She says as much in her book, but abandons any pretense of subtlety when it comes to praising Trump, now the presumptive Republican Party nominee despite facing 88 criminal charges and millions of dollars in fines for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from an allegation of rape that a judge called “substantially true.”
Calling herself “an early fan of the TV show The Apprentice” and “enjoying Donald’s slogans and cheeky business advice,” Truss says that when Trump entered politics in 2015, colleagues in parliament and “older ladies” in Swaffham, a town in her constituency, were united in “seeming[ing] truly inspired by the disruptive Republican candidate.” She draws a common link between support for Trump and support for Brexit – which she campaigned against before becoming the hardline champion on her way to leading her country.
When Trump was president, Truss writes, she “chased” Boris Johnson “down a fire escape” in New York to demand participation in a meeting between British and American leaders. According to Truss, then commerce secretary, Trump urged her and his own trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, at that meeting to continue talks on a trade deal between Britain and the US. The nuclear deal with Iran, a tactic that didn’t work.
Truss never got her trade deal. In part, she blames “many in Number 10 Downing Street” who “seemed to want to keep Trump at arm’s length for political reasons.”
“The British media provided universally negative coverage of Trump, and leftists in the Conservative Party were eager to insult him at every opportunity,” Truss writes. “My opinion was that he was the leader of the free world and an important ally.”
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That view stands in stark contrast to her abuse of Biden, who convincingly defeated Trump in an election that Trump still refuses to concede. Moreover, when it comes to the deadly consequences of that refusal — the attack on Congress that Trump incited — Truss limits her comments to a single paragraph.
On January 6, 2021, Truss writes, she was “on the phone with Bob Lighthizer,” “working on” eliminating a U.S. tariff on Scotch whiskey. From the Executive Office Building, next to the White House, Lighthizer “casually noticed that the street was full of people with huge American flags walking toward Congress. I didn’t realize how seismic that event would turn out to be.”
Truss eventually saw the whiskey tariff abolished – in the summer of 2021, after “discussions with the new Democratic administration”.
“But with Joe Biden as president,” Truss writes, “it was made very clear that a trade deal with Britain was no longer a priority. We had missed the boat.”
