“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics,” she wrote of Trump. “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.”
“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.”
Merkel’s comments are notable because of the high level of respect she commanded among European political leaders, even as her reign over Germany ended. Her thoughts on how best to treat with the ex-president will be of note to politicians preparing for a second Trump term.
The former Christian Democratic Union leader found the Trump relationship so challenging, she even sought advice from Pope Francis on how to deal with him.
“Without naming names, I asked him how he would deal with fundamentally differing opinions in a group of important personalities,” Merkel wrote, referring to a conversation around the time Trump was threatening to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. “He understood me immediately and answered me straightforwardly: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’”
“I liked this image. I repeated it to him. ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’ In this spirit, I would try to solve my problem with the Paris Agreement and Trump in Hamburg.”
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