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Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she felt “sorrow” at Donald Trump’s return to power and recalls that every meeting with him was “a competition: you or me.”
In an interview with German weekly Der Spiegel published Friday, Merkel said that Trump “is a challenge for the world, particularly for multilateralism.”
“What awaits us now is really not easy,” she said, because “the strongest economy in the world stands behind this president” with the dollar as a dominant currency.
She recalled as “a typical scene” a famously awkward moment in the Oval Office when she first visited Trump at the White House in March 2017. Photographers shouted “handshake!” and Merkel quietly asked Trump: “Do you want to have a handshake?” There was no response from Trump, who looked ahead with his hands clasped.
“I tried to coax him into a handshake for the photographers because I thought in my constructive way that maybe he hadn’t noticed they wanted such a picture,” Merkel was quoted as saying. “But of course his refusal was calculation.”
Asked what a German chancellor should know about dealing with Trump, Merkel said he was very curious and wanted details — “but only to read them for his own advantage, to find arguments that strengthen him and weaken others.”
“The more people there were in the room, the greater was his urge to be the winner,” she added. “You can’t chat with him. Every meeting is a competition: you or me.”
Merkel worked with four American presidents while she was German chancellor. She was in power throughout Trump’s first term — easily the most tense period for German-U.S. relations of her 16 years in office, which ended in late 2021.
Long-anticipated in Germany, the book, “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” promises the inside story of the woman many saw as the defender of a global liberal order.
When the world was shocked by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the first election of Trump and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Merkel exuded a kind of patient, cerebral calm that was widely seen as the bastion of an old, more predictable world order, The New York Times says.
In her memoir, extracts of which were published in the German weekly Die Zeit late on Wednesday evening, the long-serving German chancellor detailed her difficulties in dealing with Trump, who, she said, appeared to her fascinated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders.
“He saw everything from the perspective of the property developer he was before entering politics,” she wrote. “Each parcel of land could only be sold once, and if he didn’t get it someone else did. That’s how he saw the world.” Merkel herself has expressed no regret about her Russia policies and kept a low profile since leaving office.
In the published extracts of her memoir, she discusses her many encounters with Putin, describing how he struck her as a man desperate to be taken seriously.
“I experienced him as someone who didn’t want to be disrespected, ready to lash out at all times,” she wrote. “You might find that childish and contemptible, you might shake your head at that. But it meant Russia never vanished from the map.”
At one point she appears to suggest that Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was timed to follow her departure from office. “You won’t always be Chancellor, and then they’ll join NATO,” he said of Ukraine. “And I want to prevent that.”
Some Central and Eastern European leaders, she added, had been guilty of wishful thinking: “They seem to want the country to just disappear, to not exist. I couldn’t blame them… But Russia, heavily nuclear-armed, did exist.”
Merkel’s memoir will be published in more than 30 countries on Nov. 26. She will launch the book in the U.S. a week later at a Washington event with former President Barack Obama, with whom she forged a close political relationship.
