Trump calls EU, media enemies
On eve of Helsinki summit, president downplays expectations
HELSINKI — President Donald Trump named the European Union as a top adversary of the United States and denounced the news media as the “enemy of the people” before arriving in Helsinki on Sunday on the eve of his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Trump and his aides were downplaying expectations for Monday’s summit.
Trump told CBS News, “I don’t expect anything. … I go in with very low expectations.” His national security adviser said they weren’t looking for any “concrete deliverables.”
Trump spent the weekend in Scotland at his resort in Turnberry, golfing, tweeting and granting an interview to CBS News in which he named the EU at the top of his list of biggest global foes.
“I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade,” Trump said, adding that “you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”
He said that Russia is a foe “in certain respects” and that China is a foe “economically … but that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive.”
On Sunday, Trump flew to Finland, the final stop on a weeklong trip that began Tuesday. Near Trump’s hotel, police roped off a group of about 60 pro-trump demonstrators waving American flags.
Trump also said in the interview taped Saturday that he “hadn’t thought” about asking Putin to extradite the dozen Russian military intelligence officers indicted this past week in Washington on charges related to the hacking of Democratic targets in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In an interview on ABC’S “This Week,” U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said the idea of asking Putin to turn over the 12 military intelligence officials was “pretty silly” and argued that doing so would put the U.S. president in a “weak position.”
In the CBS News interview, Trump declined to discuss his goals for the summit but said he believes such sessions are beneficial.
He cited his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June as a “good thing,” with meetings he has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
From aboard Air Force One, Trump complained in tweets that he wasn’t getting enough credit for his meeting with Kim and said that “much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people.”