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.
In extracts from her more than 700-page tome, Freedom, published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the former German chancellor says she initially misread Trump during their first meeting in 2017 in the Oval Office, where he attempted to humiliate her by refusing to shake her hand before the cameras.
“Instead of stoically bearing it, I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” she writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing … He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behaviour, while I had acted as though I were having a conversation with someone completely normal.”
The book, which Merkel has been working on since she left office in 2021, has been kept under close wraps ahead of its publication date next Tuesday. It covers her upbringing in communist East Germany, her unlikely rise within the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and her 16 years in power in which she became known as the queen of Europe and “leader of the free world” – a label once used exclusively for US presidents.
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