Liz Truss attacked Joe Biden for being “asleep at the wheel” and projecting “weakness” on the global stage as she addressed American conservative activists on Thursday night.
The former prime minister said the US needed a “Republican back in the White House” to defend the country’s mantle as the leader of the “free world”.
Ms Truss is sharing a stage with Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual jamboree of grassroots conservatives.
The event is a staple of the Republican Party’s political calendar and has been dominated by Trump acolytes in recent years. This year’s conference theme is “where globalism comes to die”.
Mr Trump will be delivering an address on Saturday afternoon. His sole Republican primary rival, Nikki Haley, has not been invited to address the audience, despite doing so in previous years.
Ms Truss’s address was titled “The CPAC Revolution: Taking Back Our Parties”.
The former prime minister said while Britain was “one of the few countries that still have a conservative government”, the Left had not accepted defeat at the ballot box.
“Instead, they’ve been weaponising our court system to stop us deporting illegal immigrants,” she said.
“We’ve projected weakness, and that is what is being projected from the White House at the moment.”
Ms Truss said “too many conservatives” had gone along with Left-wing ideas, borrowing Mr Trump’s critique of establishment Republicans, which he calls “Rinos”, Republicans in name only.
“In Britain, we call them c(h)inos: Conservatives in name only,” she said.
Values challenged
She went on to warn that Western civilisation was being “undermined”, with Anglo-American values being “questioned” and “challenged”.
“I refuse to have our history talked down and I refuse to have our values talked down,” she said. “Meanwhile, we’ve seen President Biden asleep at the wheel in the White House.”
She criticised the Democratic president for his “offensive” intervention on her economic policies, suggesting it was a factor in her 49-day short tenure in Downing Street.
“I’m not saying I’m a perfect person, or I did everything exactly right,” she said. “But I faced the most almighty backlash for those conservative policies that I tried to put in place.”
Ms Truss said the backlash had come “from the usual suspects” in the media and the corporate world, but added “even the IMF intervened, and even President Biden intervened to have a go at my policies.”
She continued: “Can you imagine being attacked on your economic policies by the inventor of Bidenomics? Talk about offensive.”
The comment drew laughs, but much of her speech met with a tepid response in the half-filled ballroom at a conference centre in the Washington suburbs.
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
