As the US elections draw ever closer, Donald Trump is back in the spotlight. Last night, David Cameron met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago before travelling to Washington DC for further talks. The Foreign Secretary is making the case for continued support for Ukraine – and wants to ensure the US, if Trump becomes President, continues providing aid to the country.

Republicans have spent months trying to block a proposed $60 billion military aid payment to Ukraine, and Trump has been pretty clear in previous statements that he opposes the support package. Not only that, the Washington Post recently revealed that part of Trump’s proposal to bring an end to the Russian war in Ukraine involves pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia. Lord Cameron, for his part, has been trying to convince Republican lawmakers to approve the funding – receiving a rather direct rebuttal from one congressman Mike Waltz who said that the ‘era of Ukraine’s blank cheque from Congress is over’, while congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, rather more forthrightly, told Cameron to ‘kiss my ass’. Charming…

The Foreign Office has insisted that ‘it is standard practice for ministers to meet with opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement’ – downplaying the significance of the event. Cameron will also meet with top Biden officials during his trip, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other key figures in Congress, in a bid to urge them to ‘change the narrative on Ukraine this year’, and is also expected to bring up the Israel-Gaza conflict.

But Lord Cameron has his work cut out if he’s hoping to get Trump on side. The Foreign Secretary is not exactly an avid Trump superfan himself, saying when he was Prime Minister — and before the former president was even elected — that ‘if he came to visit our country I think it’d unite us all against him’. Mr S hopes that this meeting was a little more civil…