- A new report by journalist Carl Bernstein says President Donald Trump was described as “humiliating and intimidating” in a series of phone calls with Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister who served until 2019.
- Sources familiar with Trump’s appeals to world leaders said he used his most “vicious” attacks on women world leaders such as May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
- Trump is said to have called May a “fool” and criticized her handling of Brexit and other issues.
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President Donald Trump subjected Theresa May to “humiliating and intimidating” phone calls while she was the UK prime minister in which he called her “dumb,” sources said in a new report.
The CNN report by Carl Bernstein, the reporter best known for helping to break the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, quoted sources familiar with Trump’s appeals to world leaders as saying he was “almost sadistic” when speaking to his female counterparts and saved their “bulk”. vicious attacks “for leaders like May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Trump is said to have called May a “fool” and was “humiliating and intimidating” towards her while criticizing her handling of Brexit, immigration and NATO, Bernstein reports.
“He got upset about something with Theresa May, then he got nasty to her on the phone call,” said a source familiar with his calls.
Trump publicly criticized May’s handling of Brexit during his time as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2019.
In July 2018, he said May’s plans to establish relatively close trade relations with the European Union would “kill” hopes of a trade deal with the United States. May of the same month he said that Trump had told him to sue the EU instead of negotiating with the bloc.
John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for part of May’s time in office, in his memoirs accused the May government of having “disastrously handled” the UK’s exit from the EU.
Bernstein’s report suggested that Merkel had remained calm when dealing with Trump, but May seemed “nervous and edgy” about the president’s treatment of her.
“He clearly intimidated her and intended to do so,” said a source familiar with the phone calls in the Bernstein report.
His treatment of May and Merkel contrasts with his behavior towards leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the report suggests.
“It is the hardest [in the phone calls] that he considers weak and weaker that he should be tough with, “a source said.
May, who resigned as prime minister last year and was succeeded by Boris Johnson, faced criticism in the United Kingdom that he did not resist Trump enough during his time in office.
In 2017, opposition parties accused her of being weak in their response to Trump’s efforts to temporarily restrict entry to the United States of people arriving from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations.
