Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel ripped into Donald Trump in a new memoir previewed by Politico on Wednesday.
The memoir by Merkel, who led the center-right Christian Democratic Union party and was in office through the first half of Trump's presidency, comes as Trump prepares to take office once again, and the European Union grapples with the potential implications of his more pro-Russia and anti-NATO beliefs.
“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics. Each property could only be allocated once. If he didn’t get it, someone else did. That was also how he looked at the world,” wrote Merkel. “For him, all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other; he did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through co-operation.”
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She continued, saying that when she visited him at the White House in 2017, “We spoke on two different levels."
"Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one," she said. "When he did pay attention to my arguments, it was usually only in order to construct new accusations from them ... When I flew home, I didn’t have a good feeling. I concluded from my conversations: There would be no joint work for a networked world with Trump.”
When he first took office Trump immediately set about withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Joe Biden re-entered but Trump appears set to leave again, and ultimately tore up other treaties on cooperation and security.
Many world leaders are concerned that Trump, despite picking neoconservative hawks for his Cabinet, could abandon Ukraine as it tries to hold the line against the brutal Russian invasion.