Merkel mistook Trump: “I treated him like a normal person”
Starting next week, the political memoirs of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (70) will hit the shelves. However, the German newspaper “Die Zeit” has already been able to obtain a copy of Merkel's book, and published some remarkable passages.
Emotional Trump
For sixteen years Merkel was Chancellor of Germany, and during that period from 2005 to 2021 she spoke several times with Donald Trump. According to Merkel, the Republican who will soon move back to the White House spoke each time on an “emotional level” while she herself kept it “factual. She therefore found it a real challenge to deal with him. “It seemed that his main goal was to make the person he was talking to feel guilty,” the Chancellor added. “At the same time, I got the feeling that he also wanted that person to like him.”
Merkel stressed that she was wrong about Trump since she first thought he was "normal".
'Clever Trump knew very well what he was doing'
By the way, when Angela Merkel first met future U.S. President Donald Trump, she did not realize that he was trying to insult her.
The first meeting between Angela Merkel and Donald Trump took place at the White House in 2017. The two initially shook hands, but when the then president of the United States was asked to shake Merkel's hand on camera, Trump remained silent in his chair. “Instead of remaining stoic, I whispered to him that it would be best if we shook hands again,” Merkel now recounts in her memoirs.
“As soon as those words had left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I have forgotten that Trump knew exactly what he was doing,” the former Chancellor continued. “He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behavior, while I had behaved as if I were having a conversation with someone who was perfectly normal.”
Dictatorial traits
Besides, according to the former chancellor, Trump did not believe in cooperation. “He was convinced that all countries were competitors of each other, where the success of one meant the failure of the other. He did not believe that the prosperity of all countries could be increased through cooperation.”
During a March 2017 meeting, Trump was suddenly very interested in Merkel's opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It was very clear that he was fascinated by the Russian president,” she writes. “And also in the years that followed, I had the impression that politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits really fascinated him.”
Not long ago, by the way, it became known that Trump has called Putin at least 7 times since leaving the White House in 2021.
(FVDV for Tagtik/Source: Die Zeit/Picture by the Executive Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons - Public domain)