The Washington Post released the transcripts of President Trump’s January phone calls with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Malcolm Trumbull of Australia.
The Washington on Thursday Post published transcripts of President Trump’s January phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia — and they include plenty of bizarre, surreal, and stunnning moments.
The calls — which took place about a week after Trump was inaugurated — have been previously reported, but transcripts offer a deeper look into the president’s interactions with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia.
In the phone conversations, which took place on Jan. 27 and Jan 28, Trump is deeply concerned about his public image and keeping two major promises from the campaign: making Mexico pay for the border wall and to be tough on accepting refugees.
During the call with Peña Nieto, Trump pressured the Mexican president to stop publicly saying that Mexico won’t pay for the wall.
“You cannot say that to the press,” Trump said during the call. “The press is going to go with that and I cannot live with that. You cannot say that to the press because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances.”
Trump — who spoke almost twice as much as Peña Nieto (Trump spoke 3,590 words to Pena Nieto’s 1,869) — urged the Mexican to publicly say that the two countries are negotiating the wall’s payment, which “means it will come out in the wash and that’s is OK.”
Peña Nieto offered concise, direct responses to Trump's long yarns, and focused on the necessity of a good relationship between the two countries.
The Australian prime minister spent most of the heated phone call with Trump trying to convince him to honor a deal President Obama signed in which the US agreed to resettle up to 1,250 refugees being held in Australian detention centers in exchange for Australia taking US refugees from Central America.
The day before the call, Trump signed an executive order suspending the refugee program and barring people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. Trump appears to not fully know the details of the deal, which he told Turnbull “is going to kill me,” and that “this deal will make me look terrible.”
Trump’s anger is clear — “I will say I hate it,” he tells Turnbull — but the Australian prime minister played tough with him and cornered the president into saying he will honor the deal, saying at one point, "there is nothing more important in business or politics than a deal is a deal." Turnbull interrupted Trump several times and even corrected him.
The Washington Post reported in February about Trump’s angry phone call with Turnbull — something Trump denied in a tweet calling the report “fake news.”
“Thank you to Prime Minister of Australia for telling the truth about our very civil conversation that FAKE NEWS media lied about. Very nice!” he tweeted.
But as the transcripts show — the original reporting was correct and Trump's tweet was misleading.
Here are some of the most jaw-dropping moments from the calls:
"I met you the one time and I studied you. You are a very hard person to study."
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/2vxeqju
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