Summary
In her memoir Freedom, Angela Merkel reflects on her misjudgment of Donald Trump, initially treating him as “completely normal” before realizing his emotional nature and authoritarian inclinations.
She recounts his attempts to humiliate her, his zero-sum worldview, and fascination with autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin.
Merkel also critiques Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and his hostility toward Germany.
Addressing her legacy, she discusses tensions with Putin over NATO and acknowledges criticism of her reliance on Russian gas and liberal refugee policies.
Lots of critical comments here. Can we just please applaud a politician who -I know, in huge retrospect- admits to her being wrong about something.
Would I rather have politicians who make no mistakes at all? Yes. I just dispise the amount of politicians who never ever own up to their mistakes and keep on vaguely blaming everyone but themselves. It was Trump that exarbated that method (though it had been in use much longer, he just went in more blatantly.)
Lets please celebrate boring, conscientious politicians that own up to their mistakes and instead hate on the ones that get off scott free by lying their asses off. That’d be great
Well that was pretty fucking stupid.
uh, that one’s on you, merkel
I guess she missed the last 30 years of Trumps antics.
I’m from a country that borders Germany and I don’t think I had any good idea who Donald Trump was before 2015. I may have heard the name at some point, but no more than that.
He was the laughing stock of NY (where he was from). A know racist too.
Ok but as an American he was just some rich guy on tv outside New York. It makes sense Europeans may not know him or might assume it was an act
Not really, she’s just being political.
If you say “I always knew he was a raging narcissist.” then you clearly had a bias against him, so whatever you say next is just a further expansion of that bias.
If you say “I thought he was normal, but I learned more.” then you went in this with an open mind and people are more likely to listen to what you learned.
Basically shitty political dialogue where being honest is the worst fucking thing anyone can do even though everyone knows it is bullshit. Humanity is so fucking stupid.
I mean, why would she care? He’s was a US business man and she was a German politician. They would have little to no overlap and even when he became president she had more to do than spend the days of would take going over his list of bullshittery. It’s easy to see immediately that he is a terrible person, realizing that he’s quite literally toxic takes actually investing time into.
Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she says in her keenly awaited 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.
like everyone else around him. clickbait
Please explain how that makes it clickbait
“Look at that naïve idiot Merkel, she thought trump was normal”. No, she started trying to treat him as normal guy, but quickly found otherwise.
That is at best a misleading title and at worst ragebait.
It isn’t a ragebait just because you are raging for no reason. That line is in the article, it is in the book. It isn’t clickbait by definition.
