It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the deal. But it could have been a lot worse.
And after the week Sir Keir Starmer has just been through, President Trump’s grudging support for the controversial Chagos deal will have come as a relief.
The good news for the PM was the president signalling he won’t now block the deal the Conservatives and Reform UK have claimed is a surrender.
The bad news is that the president has warned that if anything goes wrong in future, the US won’t hesitate to send in the gunships and take over the islands.
So it’s a rare piece of moderately good news for the PM amid a relentless onslaught from opponents and Labour MPs over his bungling of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal.
The Chagos deal the prime minister had made, the president said on his Truth Social, was “according to many, the best he could make”.
According to many? Who does he mean? Obviously not former ambassador Mandelson. He’s now a disgraced non-person and probably just a distant memory in Washington.
“Peter who?” they’ll no doubt be saying in the White House these days. “We’ll never forget old whatshisname.”
The news from the White House is moderately good for Sir Keir because only a few weeks ago the president called his Chagos deal “an act of great stupidity” and “total weakness”.
That savage criticism emboldened Conservative and Reform UK MPs and Tory peers at Westminster to attempt to kill the Chagos legislation, which is currently holed below the waterline in the House of Lords.
A few days after the president’s “stupidity” claim, Kemi Badenoch taunted Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs: “We didn’t need President Trump to tell us that. We’ve been saying that…
