Angela Merkel found Trump's G7 shenanigans 'a bit depressing'

(Image credit: Jesco Denzel/Bundesregierung via Getty Images)

published 11 June 2018

German Chancellor Angela Merkel found President Trump's behavior at the weekend's G7 summit in Canada "sobering and a bit depressing," she said in a new television interview.

"The situation isn't very nice," Merkel mused. "I don't think that ratcheting up the rhetoric is going to improve things," she continued. "Sometimes I get the impression that the U.S. president believes that only one side wins and the other loses," said Merkel, adding that she believes mutually beneficial arrangements are possible.

Merkel is not the first to identify Trump's zero-sum view of trade (and everything else). Negotiation experts and people who have negotiated with and against Trump described him as "confident, competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional, unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven, want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator" in a recent Politico report, a pattern of behavior that was on full display in Quebec.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.