LONDON — Even before President Trump arrived in London on Monday for three days of planned pomp and circumstance, his state visit had already become dominated by insults and political intrigue.

 Hours before he was scheduled to visit Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, the president launched a Twitter attack against London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has publicly objected to the plan to fete Trump with a ceremonial state visit. Trump responded by criticizing Khan’s record as mayor and attacking him over his height.

 “@SadiqKhan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly ‘nasty’ to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom. He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me,” Trump wrote on Twitter as Air Force One was about to land in Britain. “Kahn [sic] reminds me very much of our very dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, de Blasio, who has also done a terrible job – only half his height. In any event, I look forward to being a great friend to the United Kingdom, and am looking very much forward to my visit. Landing now!”

 It was the latest broadside by Trump, who has prefaced his visit with digs at Prime Minister Theresa May, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and American-born royal Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

 Trump later attended an official welcome ceremony with the queen, which is set to be followed by a private lunch, a tour of Westminster Abbey, tea with Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, and an evening banquet at Buckingham Palace with the queen and other members of the British elite.

 On Tuesday, Trump plans to hold meetings with May, who is stepping down as Conservative leader later this week after failing to gain support for her Brexit plan.

[As Trump’s state visit looms, Britain seems a reluctant host]

 Typically, a state visit includes a few nights bunking with the monarch at Buckingham Palace in central London. But Trump will not be staying there, as the palace is undergoing renovations. 

 Nor will he receive the royal welcome at Horse Guards Parade or a gold carriage procession down the Mall, due to security concerns.

 Woody Johnson, the U.S. ambassador and owner of the New York Jets football team, called the state visit “very significant.” 

 “He knows the security and prosperity of the U.S. is directly linked to the security and prosperity of the U.K. The special relationship will be a huge focus as we remember D-Day,” Johnson told the BBC. 

 “When I last spoke to him he was extremely enthusiastic. The president’s mother was born here, and this is part of his DNA. Everything he is about revolves around this relationship. It could not be more important,” Johnson said

 Johnson said the Trump administration was looking forward to signing a U.S.-British trade deal — though in the past Johnson warned that the exit deal with the E.U. that May tried to pass through Parliament could threaten an agreement with Washington. 

 More controversial, Johnson said Sunday that a future trade deal with the United States would include British health care, specifically the social medicine program called the National Health Service. Although Britons often complain about it, the program has broad support.

 Many Britons have expressed fear that the United States has designs on profiting from the NHS.

 Asked if British consumers would buy U.S. meat and vegetables, which have less strict regulations over chemicals, Johnson said British consumers would make their own choices.

 It’s unclear how much Trump will be able to focus on the British pageantry rather than the political drama back in the United States, where the president faces a burgeoning trade war with Mexico, intensifying congressional investigations and growing calls for impeachment.

 Trump’s unprompted attack on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio — who is one of two dozen Democratic candidates seeking to unseat Trump — offers a signal that the president will continue to engage in domestic politics even while on foreign soil.

While in Japan last month, Trump used the words of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to attack another rival, former vice president Joe Biden — calling him a “low IQ individual.”

Read more

Britain is at its most delicate political moment in years. Now here comes Trump.

Trump says in recorded interview that Duchess Meghan was ‘nasty’ about him, then tweets: I never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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The headlines in major newspapers the day after the Columbine massacre were shocking — and they were wrong:

“Up to 25 Die in Colorado School Shooting” (The Washington Post)

Gunmen Stalk School, Killing Up to 25 and Wounding 20″ (Los Angeles Times)

“High School Massacre: Columbine bloodbath leaves up to 25 dead” (Denver Post)

In fact, the death toll was lower — 12 students and one teacher were killed on April 20, 1999 by shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then took their own lives. Even so, Columbine remained the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history until the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 that left 17 dead.

Saturday marks 20 years since the Columbine massacre. There will be a public memorial service in the Denver suburb where it occurred and tributes to the victims everywhere.

And while correcting the death toll took only a day, other aspects of early reports that turned out to be unfounded have lingered in the nation’s subconscious.

“It’s frustrating because we’ve known so much for so long, but initial impressions are hard to change,” said Peter Langman, a psychologist who has studied school shootings so extensively that Sue Klebold contacted him for insight about her son Dylan while she was writing a memoir.

[The man keeping Columbine safe]

1. Harris and Klebold were not in the Trench Coat Mafia

Even as the massacre was unfolding, students told journalists that Harris and Klebold were members of a group known as the Trench Coat Mafia.

The Washington Post put it this way: “The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an unspeakable landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a small clique of outcasts who always wore black trench coats and spent their entire adolescence deep inside the morose subculture of Gothic fantasy, their fellow students said.”

The Denver Post reported: “By several accounts, the group [was] also interested in the occult, mutilation, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and Adolf Hitler.”

And the New York Times: “[I]nvestigators now believe that among the dozen or so students in the group were the people responsible for yesterday’s mass shooting at the high school.”

Students and investigators did say this to reporters. But Columbine was a large school with 2,000 students. Many “did not know [Harris and Klebold], or knew them only as kids who sometimes wore trench coats,” Langman wrote in a 2008 report.

“As a result, people assumed that [Harris and Klebold] were part of the Trench Coat Mafia; this assumption is wrong.”

[‘Damaged masculinity’ may help explain Columbine and other mass shootings]

Police also later determined that some students confused Klebold with another student who was in the group and resembled Klebold.

2. Harris and Klebold were not isolated outcasts or loners.

In the conflation of Harris and Klebold with the Trench Coat Mafia, they became synonymous with the word “outcast,” which appeared in every major newspaper report. The Post said people described them as an “isolated pair”; the Denver Post used “loners.”

But a thorough look at the shooters’ lives, one not based on panicked students’ reports, refutes this, Langman said.

“They both had a lot of friends. They both engaged in school activities, out-of-school activities, they worked part-time jobs with some of their buddies at a pizza shop,” Langman said.

Both were in a bowling league. Harris had played on the school soccer team as a freshman and sophomore, and continued to play soccer and volleyball after school, according to the sheriff’s office report. Klebold was in a fantasy baseball league and had gone to prom with a female friend a few days before the massacre.

3. The attack was not revenge for being bullied.

The first articles also indicated that Harris and Klebold sought revenge against classmates who had bullied them. The New York Times said Harris and Klebold appeared to target “peers who had poked fun at the group in the past.” The Post said students described them as “a constant target of derision for at least four years.” The Los Angeles Times said students considered the attack “lethal payback for old taunts and prejudices.”

But a look at police records and Harris’s and Klebold’s own writings paint a much more complex portrait, Langman said. Yes, Harris and Klebold were sometimes teased, but they were nowhere near the most bullied in the school and were much more frequently the bullies than the victims of bullies.

Since Columbine, more than 226,000 students have experienced gun violence at U.S. schools, according to Washington Post data. The frequency of school shootings has spurred changes in reporting aimed at limiting inaccuracies such as those that followed the Columbine massacre. The Poynter Institute and Suicide Awareness Voice of Education urge journalists to avoid reporting secondhand witness statements or amplifying small details, and the Radio Television Digital News Association warns against broadcasting the locations of victims and law enforcement while shooters are still active.

Others recommend avoiding the use of shooters’ names or publishing photos that glorify their crimes. This is because of another aspect of modern school shootings that started with Columbine — glorification of mass shooters on the Internet. As The Post’s Jessica Contrera reported this month, more than 150 strangers show up at the Columbine High School campus every month. Many are obsessed with the attacks, and pore over Harris’s and Klebold’s online writings and photos.

This week, an 18-year-old woman described by authorities as “infatuated” with the Columbine massacre traveled from her home in Florida to Colorado. Sol Pais immediately purchased the same kind of weapon used by one of the Columbine shooters at a gun shop two miles from the school, setting off a massive manhunt. She ran from the FBI and took her own life — her case becoming another reminder of the Columbine shooting’s enduring and dangerous mythology.

Read more Retropolis:

The accused New Zealand shooter and an all-white Europe that never existed

Virginia Tech was not the worst school massacre in U.S. history. This was.

A masked shooter. A campus killing. And a manhunt 159 years before Columbine.

A gunmaker once tried to reform itself. The NRA nearly destroyed it.

A familiar story line played out Monday night for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who condemned one of President Trump’s most trusted advisers only to end up being accused of anti-Semitism.

“Stephen Miller is a white nationalist,” she tweeted on Monday afternoon. “The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage.” But because Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, is Jewish, Omar’s fervent detractors on the right saw her comments not as incendiary criticism of Miller’s hard-line immigration policies but instead as part of a pattern of targeting Jews.

“During my time in Congress before @IlhanOmar got here, I didn’t once witness another Member target Jewish people like this with the name calling & other personal attacks,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), perhaps Omar’s most relentless critic, wrote on Twitter. “In 2019 though, for @IlhanOmar, this is just called Monday.”

The latest spat comes just days after a New York man was arrested on charges of threatening Omar by pledging to “put a bullet in her [expletive] skull,” rhetoric that the freshman congresswoman’s supporters say has been emboldened by the heated accusations of Jewish bias coupled with Islamophobia. Omar, a Somali refugee, is Muslim.

Claims of anti-Semitism have vexed Omar since she took office this year, after she suggested that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an influential Jewish lobbying group, wielded power over members of Congress through money. But to Omar’s backers, the ubiquitous attacks from the right since then have amounted to a politically expedient smear campaign that trivializes the meaning of true anti-Semitism. To others, it’s part of a greater effort to silence women of color in Congress, fueling vitriolic attacks and death threats.

Omar’s remarks Monday were spurred by reports that Miller’s desire for tougher candidates to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement contributed to Trump’s decision to withdraw the nomination of Ronald Vitiello. Miller has been the architect behind numerous hard-line immigration policies, such as family separation, and has advocated for closing the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

Critics from Donald Trump Jr. to pundits from various conservative news outlets immediately pounced on Omar, questioning how a Jewish person could be accused of being a white nationalist.

“I see that the head of the Farrakhan Fan Club, @IlhanMN, took a short break from spewing her usual anti-semitic bigotry today to accuse a Jewish man of being a ‘white nationalist’ because she apparently has no shame,” wrote Trump Jr., referring to Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam.

Matt Wolking, deputy communications director for the president’s reelection campaign, offered this straightforward take on Twitter: “He’s Jewish, and Ilhan Omar is a racist anti-Semite.”

The backlash reflects an apparent effort among some members of the GOP to use Omar’s comments to sow division within the Democratic Party and among Jewish Democratic voters. Take Christian Ziegler, the vice chairman of the Florida GOP, who used the backlash to urge “my Jewish friends” to join the alleged “#jexodus” movement, encouraging Jews to leave the Democratic Party en masse.

Some mocked the critics for appearing to extrapolate an anti-Jewish bias from Omar’s remarks, while others attacked Zeldin, the Republican congressman from New York.

“Rep. Zeldin is using his Jewishness to provide cover for a white nationalist regime that stokes hatred and terror for Jews (and many other peoples) in a US that until President Trump felt so safe and secure for us,” wrote economist David Rothschild.

“Inappropriate accusations of anti-Semitism masks the ugliness of the real thing,” Perry Gershon, a Democratic businessman who lost to Zeldin in 2018 and plans to challenge him for his seat in the next election cycle, wrote on Twitter, linking to Zeldin’s comments.

Omar has long argued that her condemnation of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people has been erroneously conflated with condemnation of Jewish people. In February, she apologized for using what was criticized as an anti-Semitic trope when she suggested that AIPAC could buy support from members of Congress. “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she tweeted at the time, making a reference to $100 bills. Last month, she was accused of suggesting Jews harbor “dual loyalty” to the United States and Israel after slamming “the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

In her apology, Omar said she either did not intend to offend Jews or was ignorant to the fact that she was using anti-Semitic tropes. The House passed a generic resolution condemning bigotry in response.

But the attacks on Omar didn’t slow. On Saturday, one day after federal prosecutors announced charges against the man who allegedly threatened to kill Omar, Trump mocked her during a speech before members of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.

“Special thanks to Representative Omar of Minnesota,” Trump told members in attendance, including casino magnate and prominent Republican donor Sheldon Adelson. “Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel. I forgot. I’m so sorry.”

Trump was also accused of expressing the same “dual loyalty” trope that critics said Omar had used. Speaking to the group of Republican Jews on Saturday, Trump described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” and asked the audience to explain “to some of your people” why they shouldn’t oppose his tariffs on imported goods.

“Mr. President, the Prime Minister of Israel is the leader of his (or her) country, not ours,” the American Jewish Committee tweeted. “Statements to the contrary, from staunch friends or harsh critics, feed bigotry.”

A spokesman for Omar could not immediately be reached for comment early Tuesday regarding the latest accusations of anti-Semitism.