PARIS (AP) — While Europe is pushing back publicly against U.S. President Donald Trump over Greenland, the language appears softer behind the scenes.
While Europe is pushing back publicly against U.S. President Donald Trump over Greenland, the language appears softer behind the scenes.
Trump published a text message on Tuesday that he received from French President Emmanuel Macron, confirmed as genuine by Macron’s office.
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Starting with “My friend,” Macron’s tone was more deferential than the criticism that France and some of its European partner nations are openly voicing against Trump’s push to wrest Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.
Before broaching the Greenland dispute, Macron opted in his message to first talk about other issues where he and Trump seem roughly on the same page.
“We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran,” the French leader wrote in English.
Then, he added: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” immediately followed by: “Let us try to build great things.”
That was the only mention that Macron made of the semi-autonomous Danish territory in the two sections of message that Trump published. It wasn’t immediately clear from Trump’s post when he received the message.
World leaders’ private messages to each other rarely make it verbatim into the public domain — enabling them to project one face publicly and another to each other.
But Trump — as is his wont across multiple domains — is casting traditions and diplomatic niceties to the wind and, in the process, lifting back the curtain on goings-on that usually aren’t seen.
This week, a text message that Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister also became public, released by the Norwegian government and confirmed by the White House.
