Former German chancellor Angela Merkel called US PresidentDonald Trump an attention-seeker, while speaking at an event organised by Greek newspaper Kathimerini in Athens on Wednesday.Merkel was attending an event to promote the Greek edition of her memoir “Freedom” when she recalled an incident from March 2017. At a meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, he refused to shake hands with her, an incident that took place off-camera, outside the main room.“I made the mistake of saying, ‘Donald, we should shake hands,’ and he didn’t. He wanted to draw attention to himself. That’s what he wants: to distract and have everyone look at him,” Merkel said. “You can see this in what he is doing with the tariffs. Ultimately, he must deliver good results for the American people. He has to prove his abilities, at least to his own country,” she added.She went on to urge the European Union to stand up to Trump’s tariff threats and not be intimidated. “Europeans must stand united and not be intimidated when Trump imposes more tariffs on the bloc, but we should retaliate with tariffs of our own.” “I’m not saying we should break off relations with the US, but we must negotiate. Even the US cannot survive alone,” Merkel said, adding: “I see a problematic development. When Vice President Vance says, ‘we are partners, and we will only support you if you agree with our concept of freedom,’ which means no rules and no controls, that is indeed a threat to our democracy.”Merkel was at the helm of European affairs as the de-facto leader of the EU during Trump’s first Presidency, but the pair never had an easy rapport. Describing this often-strained equation, she wrote about Trump in her memoir: “He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics. 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.”
