German Chancellor Angela Merkel called President Donald Trump’s “withdrawal via Twitter” from the agreed-upon joint G-7 communiqué, which was co-authored by every member of the Group of Seven, “of course sobering and a little depressing” in an interview following the summit.
Several outlets, including German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle and Politico, translated parts of Merkel’s remarks, which she made in a Sunday interview with German broadcaster ARD.
“The situation isn’t very nice,” Merkel said. “I don’t think that ratcheting up the rhetoric is going to improve things.”
Trump announced in tweets following his early departure from the summit that he would refuse to sign the communiqué as a result of press conference comments by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau had simply reiterated points he’d made before: that Canada planned dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
Trump advisers Larry Kudlow and Peter Navarro nonetheless toed the presidential line, savaging Trudeau in Sunday show appearances over what Kudlow acknowledged were “things that the prime minister has said before, basically.”
“There are still good reasons to fight for the trans-Atlantic partnership,” Merkel said Sunday, hedging that the European Union shouldn’t “imprudently” follow the United States.
“We won’t let ourselves be ripped off again and again,” she said, referring to the new American tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. “Instead, we act then too.”
Merkel described the joint communiqué Trump refused to sign, despite America’s co-authorship, as “arduously negotiated.”
Citing Trump’s withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas said Sunday that Trump’s withdrawal from the summit communiqué was “actually not a real surprise.”
“We have seen this with the climate agreement or the Iran deal,” he said.
Translated from the German, “I’ve seen retarded two-year old with more self-control.”
Sober? Nope
Depressed? Yep.
But enough about me…
Kudlow, Navarro, Bolton – these are the people you add to an institution if you want to kill it. And it isn’t just in the areas of trade and foreign policy, the same is true of cartoon characters like Carson, DeVos, Zinke, Pruitt, and Perry, who have been poisoning their departments since day one. The contempt and deep sense of grievance that that Trump has toward the government and democratic values is so fundamentally anti-American that it is hard to understand why the public discussion is still limited to obstruction and conspiracy, when it should also be about treason.
Gott in Himmel!! Hast du gesehen in deine Leben? Was für ein Esel!
That’s certainly the case with DeVos, Zinke, Pruitt etc – however I’d argue they were picked largely by the Republican establishment during the transition, rather than Trump himself, with an eye towards exactly the sort of deregulation and bureaucratic dismembering that you’re referring to. Kudlow, Navarro and Bolton, on the other hand, were hand-picked by Trump directly, as examples of his “free-wheeling shoot-from-the-hip style” as CNN would put it (vastly over-sanitized news-speak for “aggressive idiocy”) and don’t actually have departments to destroy. Their appointments aren’t any more nuanced than “will you be loyal to Trump?”, “will you be aggressive on demand?” and “will you go on TV a lot?”