European Union

Report: Trump Offered Macron a Deal He Could Easily Refuse

Written by SK Ashby

The world is very fortunate that French President Emmanuel Macron is not even one tenth as idiotic as Donald Trump is.

According to the Washington Post, Trump asked Macron to leave the European Union (EU) in exchange for a bilateral trade deal during his official visit in April.

During a private meeting at the White House in late April, Trump was discussing trade with French President Emmanuel Macron. At one point, he asked Macron, “Why don’t you leave the E.U.?” and said that if France exited the union, Trump would offer it a bilateral trade deal with better terms than the E.U. as a whole gets from the United States, according to two European officials. The White House did not dispute the officials’ account, but declined to comment.

Macron and his administration have access to better information than we do and what we know tells us Trump does not actually make deals.

Trump's idea of a "deal" is he gets everything and you get nothing. Or, in the case of North Korea and other dictatorships, his idea of a "deal" is they get everything and he gets nothing.

Even if you approach Trump with a genuine offer, as China and our other major trading partners have come to learn, he will throw it back in your face because he does not believe in honest negotiations. Trump believes the rest of the world is just as self-centered and absorbed as he is and thus he does not trust anyone who negotiates in good faith because he exhibits none.

Beside all of that, there's nothing Trump could offer France that they don't already have. They don't need us. The EU is already the largest trading bloc in the world and the world's second largest economy behind China. China and the EU are currently negotiating a trade deal.

France leaving the EU would destabilize the entire union. Destabilizing the EU happens to be an explicit goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin.