Saturday, March 18, 2017
- 4:00 PM Receive his daily intelligence briefing – Mar-a-Lago
- 5:15 PM Speak with President Michel Temer of Brazil by telephone – Mar-a-Lago
Early Friday afternoon, President Trump and German Chancellor Merkel held one of the more awkward photo ops in recent memory.
Merkel sat, looking like she was trying hard to appear casual. Trump barely bothered, grimacing tightly. When photographers asked for a handshake, Merkel asked Trump if they should shake hands. He either did not hear or pretended not to.
As it turns out, this was only a warm-up for the dual press conference the two leaders held later Friday afternoon, during which Merkel stood beside Trump as he
- ridiculed a German reporter,
- lied about his statements on his baseless conspiracy theory that President Obama surveilled him, and
- refused to back down on claims that have set off a diplomatic incident with the United Kingdom.
The fact that it might be a tense conversation was clear from the two leaders’ opening statements. Trump, during his, once again complained about the cost of NATO. “I reiterated to Chancellor Merkel my strong support for NATO as well as the need for our NATO allies to pay their fair share for the cost defense,” he said. “Many nations owe vast sums of money from past years and it is very unfair to the United States. These nations must pay what they owe.”
As for Merkel, she used her own statement to issue a veiled scolding for Trump, who previously said she was “ruining” Germany with a “catastrophic mistake” of an open-door refugee policy. “I've always said it's much, much better to talk to one another and not about one another, and I think our conversation proved this,” Merkel said.
Perhaps that is so, but there was little talking to each other during the press conference; instead, Trump shot from the hip and Merkel sought to either smooth things over or stay out of the way. It wasn’t an easy task.
Trump got several questions about his continued, inexplicable insistence that President Obama surveilled him prior to the election. He ignored the first, which came from a German reporter, but answered it the second time, when a second German reporter asked if it had been a mistake for Sean Spicer to read a story in the White House briefing room on Thursday that accused the British intelligence agency GCHQ of helping to surveil Trump.
The president started off with an uncomfortable deadpan remark—joke?—about the 2013 revelation that Merkel had been the subject of NSA wiretaps.
“As far as wiretapping I guess by this past administration, at least we have something in common perhaps,” Trump said, to somewhat incredulous laughter in the room…
Trump also berated a German reporter who asked Merkel about Trump’s “isolationism” and then asked the president why he was “scared of adversity in the news.”
“Nice friendly reporter,” he said sarcastically. “I am a trader, I am a fair trader, a trader that wants to see good for everybody worldwide, but I'm not an isolationist by any stretch of the imagination, so I don't know what newspaper you're reading, so I guess that would be another example of fake news.”