Current and former top Trump administration officials, up to and including former U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, say President Donald Trump engages in “abusive” and “bullying” attacks on foreign leaders, in telephone calls and in person.
“White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations” say Trump “posed a danger to the national security of the United States,” Carl Bernstein, writing for CNN, reports.
“In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.”
Bernstein spent four months talking with White House and intelligence officials before publishing his lengthy report.
Former top Trump deputies, including his Director of National Intelligence, and National Security Advisor, Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, and Chief of Staff, among others, concluded “that the President was often ‘delusional,’ as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.”
Trump “regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America’s principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was ‘stupid.'”
Trump’s “most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as ‘near-sadistic’ by one of the sources and confirmed by others.”
Trump’s conversations with May, the UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were described as “humiliating and bullying,” with Trump attacking her as “a fool” and spineless in her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration matters.
Read the entire report here.