French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that France and the US must respect each other, in a response to a flurry of critical tweets by US President Donald Trump.
Macron said in an interview with French television TF1 that “the French don’t expect from me to answer to tweets.”
Trump on Tuesday lit into Macron over his suggestion for a European defense force, French tariffs on US wine and Macron’s approval ratings.
Asked whether Trump’s four tweets were unpleasant and inelegant, Macron said: “You summed up everything.”
He said he thinks that Trump “is doing American politics and I let him do American politics.”
“To be honest, I don’t do diplomacy or politics through tweets and comments,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux suggested that Trump lacked “common decency” by launching his broadside on a day when France was mourning victims of the November 2015 attacks in Paris.
“We were commemorating the assassination of 130 of our compatriots three years ago in Paris and Saint-Denis, and so I will reply in English: ‘Common decency’ would have been appropriate,” Griveaux said.
“Diplomacy is not made through tweets, but through bilateral discussions,” Macron said during Wednesday’s weekly Cabinet meeting in comments reported by Griveaux.
The two leaders met on Saturday last week in Paris before ceremonies commemorating a century since the armistice of World War I.
Since Macron’s election last year and their first white-knuckle handshake at a NATO summit, they have had an up-and-down relationship. Macron called Trump “my good friend” in front of reporters this weekend and their meeting was described as cordial by the French presidency.
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