‘You lack common decency,’ President Macron’s spokesman tells Trump

A French government spokesman on Wednesday accused US President
Donald Trump of a lack of “common decency” for attacking his French
counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Twitter on the third anniversary of
a jihadist massacre in Paris.

Asked to react to Trump’s tweets mocking Macron’s low poll
numbers and lashing his defence proposals, spokesman Benjamin
Griveaux told reporters: “Yesterday was November 13 when we
commemorate the murder of 130 citizens three years ago in Paris and
Saint-Denis. So I will reply in English: ‘common decency’ would
have been the appropriate thing.”

His reaction was the strongest yet by the French government to
Trump’s astonishing attack on Macron, which came two days after he
was the French leader’s guest at World War I centenary
commemorations in Paris.

Apparently irked at Macron’s criticism of nationalists in his
Armistice Day address, Trump tweeted that Macron had a “very low
approval rating” and said the French leader was “just trying to get
onto another subject.”

He also again attacked Macron over the latter’s calls for a
European army, slammed as protectionist French tariffs on US wine
and declared there was “no country more Nationalist than
France”.

Macron told CNN in an interview after talks with Trump on
Saturday that the defence row had been cleared up. He has not
reacted publicly to Trump’s latest broadside.

One of his advisors on Tuesday dismissed the tweets as “written
for Americans” and said that relations between Trump and Macron
were “not always easy but are enduring.”

(AFP)