President Trump began his second day at the NATO summit by again taking a shot at another leader in the alliance, this time Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Johnson asked Macron, “Is that why you were late?” Then Trudeau could be heard saying, “He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top.” Trudeau confirmed Wednesday that was a reference to Trump’s long and unscheduled question-and-answer session with journalists earlier Tuesday. The president bantered with reporters for more than two hours, sitting casually in a salon of Winfield House, the manicured estate of the U.S. ambassador to Britain.
Asked if the incident had given him pause for thought, Trudeau said that ensuring the focus of attention remained on matters of substance “is something that we’re all going to try to do a little harder.”“That’s complete nonsense,” he said, adding: “I really don’t know what is being referred to there.”
The gathering of NATO leaders follows Trump’s frequent criticism of alliance members as falling well short in doing their financial part through the first three years of his presidency. The first day of meetings was dominated by the fissures in the Trump-Macron relationship. Before they met on the sidelines of the summit, Trump laced into the French president for what he called “very, very nasty” comments to the Economist about NATO’s health under Trump’s leadership of its most important member.