– Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she says in her new memoir, was treating him as if he were “completely normal”, but she quickly learned of his “emotional” nature and soft spot for authoritarians and tyrants. She stressed that she was wrong about Trump since she first thought he was “normal”.– During their first meeting in 2017 in the Oval Office, where he attempted to humiliate her by refusing to shake her hand before the cameras. “I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” she writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing. He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behavior, while I had acted as though I were having a conversation with someone completely normal.”
– Now unbound by diplomatic niceties, Merkel sizes up Trump as “emotional” and driven by grievance and neediness, in contrast to her “factual” approach. “It seemed that his main aim was to make the person he was talking to feel guilty. At the same time, I had the impression that he also wanted the person he was talking with to like him.”
– Rather than trying to build bridges with traditional allies, Merkel writes, “Trump was apparently fascinated with the Russian president”, and she notes that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits had him in their thrall”.
https://lifewithnofears.blogspot.com/2025/01/5-reasons-why-former-german-chancellor.html