Donald
Trump
Footage
appears to show world leaders joking about Trump at Nato summit
Group
including Macron and Johnson appear to be discussing US president
Kate Lyons
@MsKateLyons
Wed 4 Dec
2019 09.15 GMTFirst published on Wed 4 Dec 2019 07.39 GMT
A video has
emerged that appears to show world leaders including Boris Johnson, Justin
Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron joking about Donald Trump at the opening of this
week’s Nato summit in London.
Footage
shows the leaders at a function at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday evening.
Johnson asks Macron: “Is that why you were late?” before Trudeau interjects:
“He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top”.
Trudeau
adds: “Oh, yeah, yeah yeah. He announced … ” before he is cut off by Macron, who
speaks animatedly to the group. Macron’s back is to the camera and his words
are inaudible.
It is never
said whom the group are talking about, but the exchange could relate to the US
president, who is known for his long, rambling press conferences and who had an
unscripted 50-minute back and forth with reporters on Tuesday.
As he did
at last year’s Nato meeting, Trump has thrown out normal summit protocol and
used his appearances with allied leaders to field dozens of questions from the world’s
media.
The Queen
hosted world leaders at a reception at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday night to
mark 70 years of Nato cooperation, as protesters gathered outside, rallying
against Trump and his perceived interest in the NHS in a US-UK trade deal and
Nato.
After an
edited cut in the film, the footage later shows an incredulous Trudeau telling
the group, which also included Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the
Netherlands, and Princess Anne: “You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the
floor.”
Again, it
is not known whom the group are talking about, and none of the world leaders
appeared to realise the conversation was being recorded.
The video
was originally posted online by Sputnik News, a news agency established by the
Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya. A much longer version of
the video on Sputnik’s Facebook page shows more of the interactions between
guests at the reception.
An edited version
of the video, focusing on the interactions between these leaders, with the
audio cleaned up and subtitles added, was posted on Twitter by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday.
The footage
emerged after a day when Nato disunity was on full display, as Macron accused
Turkey of colluding with Islamic State proxies, and Trump described Macron’s
criticisms of Nato’s “brain death” as insulting and “very, very nasty”.
On
Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and
the prime minsters of Denmark and Italy. He is also due to give another news
conference, this time on his own, after the 29 Nato leaders hold a full
three-hour closed-door summit session and issue a statement to celebrate their
supposed unity.
The Turkish
president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened to hold up Nato efforts to
bolster the protection of the Baltic republics against Russia unless the allies
brand the Kurdish militias who defeated Isis in Syria as “terrorists”.
Amid fears
Erdoğan could even veto the summit declaration and with barely two hours to go
before the leaders sat down for their sole roundtable discussions, the Nato
secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, admitted a solution to the issue had still
not been found.
“I’m confident
that we will be able to find a solution to the issue related to updating the
revised defence plans,” Stoltenberg said as he arrived for the summit at a
luxury golf hotel on the outskirts of London. “I discussed this with President
Erdoğan last night and we are working on the issue as we speak.”
Johnson
played down the dispute. “There is far, far more that unites us than divides
us, and I think one thing every leader here is absolutely resolved upon is the
vital importance of Nato for our collective security,” the prime minister said
as he arrived.
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