Donald Trump says China, Russia and EU are all ‘foes’ ahead of meeting with Vladimir Putin
Trump has said he may ask Putin to send to the US those Russians who hacked Democrats during the election – but National Security Adviser John Bolton said Trump would not demand ‘deliverables’ during the ‘unstructured’ meeting
US President Donald Trump on Sunday named Russia, the EU and China as “foes”, in an interview aired on the eve of his summit with Russian Premier Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
“Well I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade,” Trump said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union but they’re a foe. Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe.
“But that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive,” he said in the interview with CBS Evening News’s Jeff Glor, which was conducted on Saturday.
Earlier, Trump said that he may ask Vladimir Putin during their meeting to extradite to the US 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of attempting to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
I believe it’s really good … having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it
In the interview, the US president also sought to temper expectations about how much could be achieved.