THE DUP have said US President Joe Biden "hates the United Kingdom" and that they will not bow to pressure to accept Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal for Northern Ireland.
But US representatives rejected the attacks on their leader as "simply untrue".
It came as Biden was set to meet with the Prime Minister in Belfast on Wednesday to discuss a wide range of topics including the war in Ukraine and potential economic investment in Northern Ireland.
He was set to tell the DUP to drop its year-long boycott of the Stormont Assembly over the Brexit deal.
Senior DUP politicians accused Biden, who will spend less than 24 hours in Northern Ireland, of wanting Irish reunification.
DUP peer Nigel Dodds said: “Pressure from an American administration which is so transparently pro-nationalist constitutes no pressure on us at all.
“Our decisions will be taken with the interests of Northern Ireland at the heart of our thinking. That’s not what the Americans are about especially Joe Biden.”
In 2021, the President said his great-grandfather fled a famine-ravaged Ireland for the US because of what "the Brits" were doing.
Prior to his election, he responded to a BBC journalist asking him a question with the joke: "BBC? I'm Irish."
Sammy Wilson, DUP MP, echoed the thoughts of his fellow party member. He said: “He’s anti-British. He is pro-Republican and he has made his antipathy towards Protestants in particular very well known.
“He has fully backed the EU in this whole Protocol process. He’s refusing to come to the coronation. I don’t think any of us are rushing through the door to greet him.”
And former DUP leader Arlene Foster claimed the US president "hates the United Kingdom".
Biden previously warned the UK that there would be no post-Brexit trade deal if the UK carried out its threat to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol treaty with the EU. Sunak has since struck the new Windsor Framework agreement – a move which led to criticism from the DUP.
The SNP also demanded to know why Scotland is being “denied” access to the EU while Northern Ireland now has post-Brexit arrangements.
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has said the new treaty does not do enough to protect Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.
Amanda Sloat, the senior director for Europe at the US National Security Council, said: "It's simply untrue – the fact that the president is going to be engaging for the third time in three months, and then again next month and then again in June, with the Prime Minister of the UK shows how close our co-operation is with the UK.
"And before that, the president had numerous calls and meeting with prime minister Johnston, and prime minister Truss as well."
She went on: "President Biden obviously is a very proud Irish-American, he is proud of those Irish roots, but he is also a strong supporter of our bilateral partnership with the UK, and not only on a bilateral basis within Nato, the G7, on the UN Security Council, and we truly are working in lockstep with the British Government on all of the pressing global challenges that our countries are facing."
