Best of frenemies: the famous faces back-pedalling and grovelling to win round Donald Trump

Donald Trump's team is "irritated" by "snide" remarks about the president-elect in the UK and Europe, according to an insider.

His inner circle is angry that his "thumping election victory" is being "greeted" with complaints about his "personality", the source told the i news site. For some who've "run afoul" of Trump, his victory at the ballot box has "sparked fresh worries" that he may enter office "looking for retribution", said NBC News.

Two former Trump White House officials who have publicly spoken against him, are "scared". Some are so worried they are looking at the "immigration laws and policies" in countries they may consider fleeing to, said one, adding that it's "unreal that in this day and age in this country, we’re having these thoughts and concerns".

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Olivia Troye, a former Trump official who spoke out against the former president earlier this year, told NBC News that a passenger on a plane told her "your days are numbered".

Trump has "made different statements about whether he might target people who’ve upset him", said the broadcaster. While he has previously signalled that he will go after his critics, in February he rejected any concerns, saying: "My revenge will be success."

The Week looks at the luminaries that have had to do some quick back-pedalling now Trump is set to become the leader of the free world once again.

David Lammy

As a backbench Labour MP in 2018, David Lammy described Trump as a "tyrant", a KKK sympathiser and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath". He also said that Trump, then in his first term, was "deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic" and "no friend of Britain".

But speaking after Trump's recent victory, the foreign secretary shrugged aside those criticisms as "old news" and said you would "struggle to find any politician" who had not said some "pretty ripe things" about Trump in the past.

Darren Jones

In 2016, Labour's Darren Jones, now chief secretary to the Treasury, wrote that Trump was "repugnant" and his popularity signalled a "much longer problem for the centre-left". Six years later he said Trump promoted "divisive right-wing populism", recalled Huffington Post.

Confronted about his remarks on the BBC last week, Jones said it's "no surprise that as a Labour Party politician, I support Labour sister parties such as the Democrats" but insisted that the government "totally" respects Trump's mandate, adding that "we look forward to working with him".

Kevin Rudd

The US election outcome is also uncomfortable for Australia's ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, said the New York Times. In 2020 Rudd wrote that Trump was "the most destructive president in history", who "drags America and democracy through the mud". Rudd has now deleted the post, he said, "out of respect for the office of president of the United States".

Jeff Bezos

In 2016, Bezos said Trump's wish to lock up Hillary Clinton or refuse to accept a loss in that election "erodes our democracy around the edges". But all seems to be forgotten now as the Amazon founder congratulated Trump "on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory", "not long after strongarming the Washington Post, a newspaper he owns, into abandoning its traditional endorsement of a presidential candidate", said Forbes, "in a move that was seen as transparently friendly to Trump".

Donald Tusk

When Tusk was president of the European Council he was famously outspoken. “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” he asked in 2018 following Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear accord. Tusk also derided one of Trump's speeches endorsing nationalism and patriotism as “false and dangerous”. But this week Tusk, now prime minister of Poland, publicly congratulated Trump, tweeting he would "look forward to our cooperation for the good of the American and Polish nations".