Gordon Sondland, the former US Ambassador to the European Union, is spilling the beans on Former President (and current candidate) Donald Trump, and what he’s got to say won’t please either Trump’s base or Trump’s opponents.
For example, in an interview with Foreign Policy published last week, Snodland says that all of Trump’s compliments and friendly talk about Russian President Vladmir Putin is a big pile of bull. Trump, Snodland says, does not admire Putin at all, nor does he like him—Trump merely compliments Putin in public in order to appease his base.
Trump fired Snodland after the former Ambassador served as a key witness in the President’s first impeachment trial. Nonetheless, he has no difficulty giving the former President his due for being far more hostile to America’s current adversaries than Trump’s image often seems to be.
The relationship between the United States and North Korea received focused attention during the early year’s of Trump’s presidential term. Trump’s public diplomatic compliments to Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator leading to widespread criticism that the former President was friendly to dictators and did not value either the principles of American liberty, nor the alliances that have secured American power and security for the past eighty years. But here, too, Trump’s public performance is at odds with his personal views (at least according to Snodland). The former Ambassador says that the former President once said to him that, given half the chance, Trump would gladly stab Kim Jong Un in the stomach.
Snodland went on to say that these are not isolated examples based on the personalities of Putin and Kim, but are instead reflective of Trump’s general disdain for authoritarian leaders. He argued that Trump’s public compliments for strong men and his campaign comments on other matters—such as the war between Russia and Ukraine—are “head fakes” in order to keep his voters on side and foreign leaders receptive to his diplomatic advances.
