Former President of the European Council Donald Tusk has shared a picture of himself making a gun gesture behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s back, and slammed Brexit in his first post-presidency interview.
The 62-year-old, who abandoned his post as Prime Minister of Poland in 2014 — just weeks before his party was turfed out of office in national elections — in order to take up his much better paid former role with the European Union, tweeted that “Despite seasonal turbulence our transatlantic friendship must last”, apparently in reference to the NATO summit in London.
However, he paired this seemingly innocuous platitude with a picture of himself standing behind President Trump at a previous summit, making a likeness of a gun with his hand and pointing it at the American’s back.
The former eurocrat had a habit of sharing catty and undiplomatic material on social media even before the recent end of his term, mocking former British prime minister Theresa May with a picture of himself holding out a cakestand to her with the caption “Sorry, no cherries” in reference to the Brexit negotiations.
The tweet comes as Tusk hands over the presidency of the European Council to former Belgian prime minister Charles Michel and takes up a new role as president of the European People’s Party (EPP), a supposedly “centre-right” alliance of European political parties in which Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is the dominant force, and which is itself the dominant force in the European Parliament.
Giving his first interview as leader of the globalist-leaning euro-bloc, Tusk heaped praise on Mrs Merkel as a leader “ready to sacrifice some internal or national interest to protect Europe as a whole” — i.e. put the needs of the EU ahead of the needs of Germany and its people.
He was also heavily critical of Brexit, which he described as “one of the most spectacular mistakes”, and openly admitted that he asked former British prime minister David Cameron if he could simply ignore the British people’s vote to Leave the European Union, and that he himself made efforts to drag out the Brexit process in the hope that an opportunity to overturn it might arise.
“I asked [Cameron]: ‘Is it a decision, is it an obligation to follow this result?’” he told the left-wing Guardian.
“My intention was to at least prolong the whole debate in Europe and also in the UK. With this, maybe [it was] a little bit naive [to] hope that it could be reversible,” he added.
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